Although the two a fierce competitors they share more common bonds then some people might realize. Both were created by students at Stanford University. Yahoo! was created in January of 1994 by two Stanford graduate students Jerry Yang and David Filo. The pair originally called Yahoo! "Jerry's guide to the World Wide Web" but later changed the name to Yahoo!, commemorating the word the Jonathan Swift defined in his classic novel Gulliver's Travels. In the book Swift stated that the word was "rude, unsophisticated, uncouth." Four years after Yang and Filo had created Yahoo! and introduced it to the world (at this time it was a internet mogul) two different Stanford University students, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, created their own search engine, Google, as a research project, the date was September seventh 1998. Google started out as the search engine used on Stanford University's website before it went public on August 19, 2004. When 2006 ended Google was the leading internet search engine, it enjoyed over 50.8% of the market.

By the time it was a year old Yahoo! had had over a million hits, the sheer number of people who had found and were using Yahoo! prompted it creators to incorporated their creation in May of 1995. Yahoo! went public on April 12 1996 were it earned a total of 2.6 million dollars.

Google's progress was a little slower then Yahoo!s. Shortly after creating Google, Page and Brin registered it as the domain google.com on September 17, 1997 on Stanford University's website. Approximately one year after registering Google on Stanford University's website the pair decided to incorporate their research project. Finally, on August 19, 2004, Google had its very first public offering. Google is currently the favorite internet search engine.

After its meteoritic climb to glory Yahoo!'s creators and shareholders were confident that they were holding onto a gold mine. They didn't predict the burst of the dot.com bubble in the early two thousands. Yahoo! survived the crisis but the value of Yahoo! stocks dropped to $8.11, an all time low.

Yahoo! uses a combination of web crawler compiled and indexed results to rank the websites and webpage are registered on their search engine. In addition to rankings compiled by the web crawler, webmasters can, for a fee, purchase a submission to Yahoo!'s human compiled directory. The annual yearly fee is about three hundred dollars. The theory is that the listing human's provide will influence web crawlers into giving the website a higher ranking.

Google credits its success and popularity to the program it uses to search and rank webpage's, a program it calls PageRank. Because Google is worried about webmasters using abusive techniques to garner higher rankings for their search engines Google carefully keeps the hows and whys of PageRank a closely guarded secret. Google does confess that PageRank runs on a link analysis algorithm. PageRank was different from all the rest of the search engine optimization techniques because it graded each page based on the number of and quality of the links that pointed to it.

Yahoo! quickly grew fond of offering the webmasters that subscribed to its search engine the opportunity to purchase something called paid inclusion. In exchange for a fee, Yahoo! guaranteed that the webpage's would be ranked. What Yahoo! didn't guarantee was what type of ranking the webpage's would receive; they refused to promise that the webpage's would appear in the first two pages of a search.

Google uses a pay-per-click method to charge advertisers. Each time an advertisers link is clicked Google charges the account fifty cents.