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Michael Wolff, recalling his failed 1996 dot-com, YPN, in the book Burn Rate. All that remain of the venture are some antiquated books and the now-redirected YPN.com.

It was beautifully wrought. Your Personal Net it was called.... Your interests are our interests, we were saying; we know you don't want to have to trudge through all this data and technology. Enter Paris in a search engine and get back six hundred thousand matches...we figured it would only irritate someone who was going to Paris.... We were proposing to have actual normal people—intelligent, too—help you get this thing to work.

Yahoo press release, ten years later:

"The integration of Yahoo! Answers with Web search demonstrates the Yahoo! Search vision to enrich people's lives by enabling them to find, use, share and expand all human knowledge," said Eckart Walther, vice president of products at Yahoo! Search. "Yahoo! is providing a better search experience by making it easier for people to tap into the collective knowledge of others online for everyday questions."

Sing with Shirley Bassey now: "It's all just a little bit of history repeating."

Yahoo! Search Leverages Human Knowledge From Yahoo! Answers To Improve Web Search [Yahoo PR]