The departure of Vice President and Editor-in-Chief Ms. Srinivasan comes as Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz “manages an ongoing turnaround effort at Yahoo, which has involved restructuring management and shifting focus away from search, as the company emphasizes its online display-advertising business,” The Wall Street Journal reported.
Ms. Srinivasan, Yahoo’s fifth pioneering employee and one of the most admired in the entire industry, joined the company 15 years ago, mentioned on a company website last week that she and co-founders Jerry Yang and David Filo to develop its listing services of the then directory of websites, a responsible aggregator of a rapidly expanding Internet in the mid-1990s.
“In embarking on the assignment of bringing order to so much information, we established foundational principles for the voice of Yahoo, which are as relevant today as they were when the Web was in its infancy,” wrote Srinivasan in her Yodel Anecdotal blog.
“This was not about us or the technology, but about assisting people tap into the transformative influence of this medium. It is about what interests you, what entertains you, what informs you, what helps you express yourself. It is about what connects you to other people, what connects you to something bigger — and ultimately, what inspires you to recognize and expand your own creative capacity to make the world a better place,” she wrote.
Srinivasan’s initial efforts at editing the Internet pre-dated Google Inc. and its automated Internet search model — now distributed by many other companies, including Yahoo — which depends upon computer algorithms, the Journal reported.
Srinivasan’s pursuit made Yahoo the leading search engine in the late 90s, ahead of such rivals as AltaVista, Excite, Infoseek and Lycos. Yahoo’s human-organized listing produced more relevant search results than automated systems that used algorithms and computer “spiders” that crawled web pages.
“When we began, Yahoo was a directory of websites,” Srinivasan said. “We could not wait to see the amazing things people would do when they discovered the web. We pioneered a new profession: web surfer.”
At its peak, Yahoo became the gateway to the web for the largest number of Internet users, making Srinivasan arguably the most dominant person in search. Yahoo eventually lost the battle for search supremacy with Google and has since accepted a partnership with Microsoft Corp. that has the companies combining their market share in a revenue-sharing arrangement.
Yahoo holds roughly 19% of the U.S. search market, according to recent comScore Inc. data, compared to Google’s 63% and Microsoft’s 13%.
In an earlier official Yahoo blog post, Srinivasan wrote: “Today more than 15 years later, I’m proud to announce my progression from Yahoo employee to Yahoo user. No blog post can capture the density of this experience, the richness of what I have learned, and the profound gratitude I will always have — for [co-founders] David [Filo] and Jerry [Yang] taking that leap of faith in me, and for the thousands of Yahoo employees who have made this a place where magic happens. And above all, nothing I write can convey how humbled and inspired I have been by the hundreds of millions of you who share your time, extend your trust, and make Yahoo a part of your lives. I’m glad to count myself among you.”
Srinivasan last week declared that she was leaving Yahoo to devote more time to her “longstanding passion for jazz.” Srinivasan is chairwoman of the nonprofit San Francisco group ‘SFJAZZ‘ and is co-developing a performance and production center for creative music in New York City. Srinivasan is also a member of the White House Commission on Presidential Scholars.
“With profound respect and thanks for the past, I’m looking forward to what is next,” Srinivasan said on Yahoo’s corporate blog.
Regardless of Bartz’s efforts, Yahoo in the first quarter fell to number two in the display-advertising market with a 12.1% share, as Facebook rose to number one with a 16.2% share, according to comScore.
“We are pleased that we continued to deliver strong operating income and margin expansion,” said Yahoo CEO Bartz. “Our search fundamentals are improving and we posted another quarter of healthy display advertising growth.”
As for Srinivasan, she said she will undertake a new journey – a performance and production center for creative music in Brooklyn.