Fast Forward: Yahoo to the Recycle Bin

By Rob Pegoraro
Thursday, July 30, 2009

Adieu, Yahoo.

Not the Web site or the company, but the search engine. Yahoo announced Wednesday morning that it signed a 10-year agreement with Microsoft to combine search and advertising efforts, each ceding much of one field to the other.

"In simple terms, Microsoft will now power Yahoo! search while Yahoo! will become the exclusive worldwide relationship sales force for both companies' premium search advertisers," a press release declared.

Few Web users are likely to miss Microsoft's contribution to Web searching, but most people have fed a query to Sunnyvale, Calif.-based Yahoo at some point. Replacing Yahoo's search engine with Microsoft's Bing would delete one of the oldest landmarks in the Web landscape.

It would also take away a choice for users and a source of innovation for Web search, contrary to the claims at the "Choice. Value. Innovation." site that the companies set up to herald the news.

Yet their separate attempts have not slowed Google's steady growth. Yahoo may have no other choice but to make its search engine yet another casualty of outsourcing.

If so, it will mark the end of an long run.

Yahoo began life in February 1994 as a simple catalogue of Web sites put together by Stanford University students David Filo and Jerry Yang. It acquired its name -- short for "Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle" -- not long after and then expanded into a true search engine.

That head start, combined with Yahoo's early proficiency and the missteps of other Web sites (anybody remember Lycos, Excite or HotBot?), allowed the firm to become the Microsoft of search engines for quite a few years.

And then yet another Stanford research project took off. Google found things on the Web faster and more accurately than Yahoo and didn't try to sell you 20 unrelated things as it did. Then Google began adding other Web services -- e-mail, maps, calendars -- that made Yahoo's fare look clumsy by comparison.

In the process, Google ran away with much of the Web advertising business -- a machine that generates most of its profits.

Inertia has helped Yahoo hold on to a respectable chunk of the market even as its search site grew stagnant and new ventures including a music store and a social network flopped. Almost 20 percent of U.S. Web searches ran through its site last month, according to ComScore's data. Yahoo has also kept a spot in many browser toolbars; for example, it remains the only search-shortcut alternative to Google on the iPhone.

Microsoft, for its part, spent years fumbling around with quasi-proprietary online services such as MSN or Windows Live. Two winters ago, it tried to solve its Internet issues by proposing to buy Yahoo for around $47.5 billion.

The Microsoft folks in Redmond, Wash., should thank their counterparts in Sunnyvale for spurning that offer, against the advice of nearly everybody in the technology business. Yahoo's rejection stopped Microsoft from burning through billions of dollars just in time for the economy to plunge off a cliff, then spending years cleaning up after an AOL/Time Warner-esque collision of corporate cultures.

Left on its own, Microsoft had to build a better search site, and with Bing it may have done just that. The site, unlike some of Microsoft's older forays and Yahoo's just-redesigned home page, delivers much of the accuracy and simplicity of Google.

Should the Yahoo-Microsoft deal survive antitrust scrutiny, Yahoo's search technology won't vanish down the bit bucket; Microsoft would be able to add its features to Bing. Likewise, Microsoft will continue to handle automatically placed search ads. And other Web services, such as e-mail and instant messaging, will remain separate -- your Yahoo Mail won't get forwarded to Hotmail or vice versa.

Filo and Yang surely didn't mean for their invention to land in Microsoft's parts bin. But if the alternative is the continued surrender of Web search and advertising to Google -- a competition in which Yahoo has done little to distinguish itself lately -- the company they founded hasn't left itself many other options.

Living with technology, or trying to? E-mail Rob Pegoraro at robp@washpost.com. Read more at http://voices.washingtonpost.com/fasterforward.

In Deal, N.J., Sephardic Jews Developed a Shore Haven

By KAREEM FAHIM

A century ago, Deal, a seaside resort carved from New Jersey farmland, was known as a playground for tycoons and magnates like Isidor Straus and Benjamin Guggenheim and celebrities who visited, including Mark Twain. At lavish “summer cottages,” garden parties raised money for the favorite charities of residents, predominantly Irish Catholics and Ashkenazic Jews who summered there.

By the 1940s, some of the shine had worn off, and the fabulously rich were replaced by the merely wealthy. In the late 1960s, Sephardic Jews who lived in Brooklyn and spent summers in nearby Bradley Beach began buying land in Deal; by 1973, more than 100 families had bought property in the town. By the mid-1990s, thousands of Sephardic Jews were flocking to the town during the summers, and today, local historians estimate, they make up 80 percent of the population.

That influx has led to occasional tensions with people outside their insular community. The Sephardim in Deal, many of whom call themselves Syrian Jews, include Solomon Dwek, the failed real estate mogul who is believed to have been the government informant who helped bring charges against New Jersey politicians and rabbis in a corruption and money laundering scandal this week. Before this case, Mr. Dwek was a central figure in a community built quickly and from scratch by the Syrian Jews in Deal and nearby towns.

Today, in a town of 1,000 people that swells to many times that size in the summer, there are synagogues and yeshivas, Jewish social service agencies and a main street lined with kosher delis and Syrian Jewish grocers.

Thirty-five years ago, those institutions and businesses hardly existed, said Poopa Dweck, a longtime resident and the author of a cookbook on Syrian Jewish cuisine. Ms. Dweck, who is not related to Mr. Dwek, was part of what she called a “pioneering group” that moved from Brooklyn to Deal not to summer, but to live.

“We loved the life here,” she said. “We were able to maintain our Orthodox Jewish religion and bring up our children. It was beautiful.”

Quickly, she and the other new arrivals started building the structures of their community. “We didn’t even wait,” she said, describing how she helped found the Sephardic Women’s Organization of the Jersey Shore. “We had the first meeting in my living room.”

Dr. Richard G. Fernicola, a physician and local historian, said the first Sephardic Jew in the area might well have been Benjamin N. Cardozo, the Supreme Court justice, who had a house in neighboring Allenhurst in the 1930s. The first Syrian Jewish family in Deal arrived in 1939, moving into a home that the singer Enrico Caruso had once regularly visited, said Jim Foley, the town’s historian.

Fifty years later, when Sephardic Jews started moving to Deal in large numbers, there were occasional fights for control. In the mid-1990s, a dispute over a plan to build a synagogue on the site of a house on Main Street underscored growing divisions between the Sephardim and other residents, including other Jews. Today, some of those strains persist: in interviews, some non-Jewish residents professed resentment of the Sephardim, largely because of the crowds that descend on Deal every summer.

Generally, however, residents interact peacefully, many mingling at the Deal Casino, a historic beach club that only recently started allowing out-of-towners to become members. Much of the Sephardic summer social scene takes place in huge houses set on gigantic lawns where Victorians and Queen Annes once stood.

A generation still speaks Arabic, though some of the earliest Sephardic settlers have moved away, tired of the commute back to Brooklyn.

Some of their children have been shaped by the town’s seaside charms. Henry Garfield, 19, a Syrian Jew who called himself “somewhat religious,” ate a slice of pizza Friday afternoon along Norwood Avenue and seemed not to notice the tension that has developed in Deal. This might as well have been Malibu.

“It’s a very laid-back atmosphere,” he said. “Everyone is chilled out. We surf all day.”

Ann Farmer contributed reporting.