> Bad programmers wrote a bad search engine, and Yahoo lost all their traffic to the good search engine?
Yahoo didn't have their own search technology, until acquisition of Inktomi in 2003 (they used Inktomi to serve their results prior to using Google, whom they used until ~2004).
Correct way to put it is "they didn't hire enough good programmers to build a search engine". A web search engine isn't something bad programmers can build. They acquired a great search engine (the algorithms were, IMO, better than Google's and more immune to gaming, they were a first distributed search engine paving the way for Google's "cluster of commodity hardware" architecture [1]), but it came too late.
[1] See http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.83.... for what I mean by "paved the way". Their mistake was using Solaris on SPARC (appropriate choice in 1996) for a few years too long (Google started on Linux/x86 right away, Inktomi transitioned by the time of Yahoo's acquisition).
More than that, Yahoo's deliberate strategy at the beginning was to not build their own search engine, but just to buy the services of whatever was best out there. At one point that was Alta Vista. Later it was Inktomi. After all search was a well-studied problem, and they thought it was pretty much solved. So why put a lot of energy into building expertise in how to build what they thought would be a commodity.
Then Google demonstrated that search was not a solved problem, search was not a commodity, and it was too late.
Yahoo Search was a good search engine with an ugly and distracting front page. It's actually still better in some ways - I had a friend who was a sysadmin at Inktomi, and his team managed to run the search servers with far fewer people than Google's team. Of course, that leaves out so many details that you can't really make a good comparison.
