New Delhi: During your conversations, you must have often heard a sentence, 'Google it.' This shows how deeply a tech company has penetrated our lives. But, Google was once on the verge of being sold, not once but twice. If that deal had happened, today we would probably be saying 'Yahoo it' instead of Google.

Google was founded on 4 September 1998. Its architects were two people, Larry Page and Sergey Brin. They had no special experience in the world of technology. They wanted to sell their small startup to Yahoo so that they could resume their studies at Stanford. They set the deal price at $1 million.

Why didn't Yahoo buy Google?

Yahoo found this deal to be expensive at that time. It rejected Larry Page and Sergey Brin's offer. What Larry and Brin wanted to sell was the PageRank system that was soon to be patented and this was the beginning of Google, which changed the technology world.

Yahoo was the biggest search engine at that time. It wanted users to spend more time on its platform. On the other hand, the PageRank system was just the opposite. It would select and display the most relevant site as per the user's search. Now it was up to the user to decide which site he wanted to visit. For this reason also, it did not show interest in buying Google.

Yahoo realized its mistake

Four years later, Yahoo realized that it had made a mistake by not buying Google. To rectify this, in 2002, Yahoo's then CEO Terry Semel took the initiative to buy Google. In this regard, negotiations went on between the two companies for months. But, even here the deal could not be finalized. Actually, Yahoo was offering 3 billion dollars, while Google wanted 5 billion dollars.

Yahoo's bad times started with the rejection of this deal. On the other hand, the number of Google users started increasing day by day. Services like Gmail also increased its popularity. It started a new era by introducing Android operating system in November 2007. This operating system changed the entire way of using mobile.

Yahoo kept making mistake after mistake

Yahoo's business kept declining because it was lagging far behind Google in terms of innovation. While it was talking about buying Google, its own business was on the verge of being sold. In 2008, Microsoft Corporation offered to buy Yahoo for $44.6 billion. Microsoft's offer was Yahoo's last chance to compete with Google. But, it rejected it as well. Finally, Yahoo was bought by America's Verizon Telecommunications in 2016. And this deal happened for less than $5 billion.

There is an old Indian saying, 'Good luck knocks on everyone's door at least once'. But, good luck knocked on Yahoo's door not once but many times. But, it was probably Google's good luck that Yahoo never opened the door to welcome its good luck. And Yahoo's mistake became an opportunity for Google to establish its supremacy.