Which company actually got an offer for Google?
The retellings do not agree. Some name Yahoo, some name Excite, and some name the search engine that ruled the web before Google. No contemporary document, securities filing or named Yahoo executive fixes a 1998 meeting, a price or a room, which is why the $1 million figure belongs in the disputed column rather than in the record.
One version does have a first-hand account, and it is not Yahoo's. George Bell, then the chief executive of Excite, has described the terms he was shown: $750,000 in cash plus roughly 1 percent of Excite. Bell says the sticking point was a condition rather than the price, because Larry Page wanted Excite to pull out its own search technology and run Google's instead.
Excite tested both engines head to head first. "We really, frankly, couldn't see much difference," Bell told the Internet History Podcast in 2014. He also dismissed the tidier version that circulates online, that Excite feared better answers would push visitors off its portal faster, calling that explanation baloney in the same interview. The fuller account of how Excite handled the offer is a story of its own.
Why did Yahoo pay Google to run its search in 2000?
This is the best documented event in the whole story, and the one the viral posts leave out. On June 26, 2000, Yahoo and Google announced that Google would supply the search results on Yahoo.com, sitting behind Yahoo's human-edited directory. For about four years, a search on Yahoo really was a Google search.
Google's own filing spells out the arrangement. "Since June 2000, Yahoo has used, to varying degrees, our web search technology on its web site to provide web search services to its users," Google wrote in the Form S-1 it filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission in 2004 before going public.
The same filing shows how little the deal mattered to Google's books by the end. The Yahoo agreement accounted for less than 3 percent of Google's net revenues in 2003, and Google told Yahoo it was ending the agreement effective July 2004. Yahoo had already moved first, rolling out search built on the Inktomi and Overture technology it owned in February 2004.
So Yahoo did buy Google in a sense, one query at a time and on Google's terms, during exactly the years Google needed the exposure most.
How close did Yahoo come to buying Google in 2002?
Closer than the 1998 story, and with numbers that at least have a plausible shape. Under chief executive Terry Semel, Yahoo opened talks in 2002 to buy Google outright. The reported outcome: Yahoo put about $3 billion on the table, Google's founders wanted $5 billion, and Semel walked.
Those figures carry a disputed label too. They come from books and press accounts written years afterward rather than from filings, and different retellings shuffle which side named which number. What is not in doubt is that the two companies talked, that no deal happened, and that the gap was measured in billions rather than in the millions of the 1998 legend.
Google went public in 2004, and whatever window Yahoo had closed that year. The roles reversed four years later. In February 2008 Microsoft offered $31 a share for Yahoo, about $44.6 billion, and Yahoo's board rejected it on the grounds that the proposal substantially undervalued the company.
Who owns Yahoo today?
Yahoo is owned by funds managed by Apollo Global Management, which holds 90 percent. Verizon kept 10 percent. The deal closed on September 1, 2021 and was valued at about $5 billion, made up of $4.25 billion in cash plus $750 million in preferred interests. At the close the group reported roughly 900 million monthly active users and included Yahoo Mail, Yahoo Finance, Yahoo Sports, AOL and TechCrunch. "This is a new era for Yahoo," said Guru Gowrappan, the chief executive at the time, in the announcement TechCrunch reported on the day the sale completed.
The path there was a long markdown. Verizon paid $4.4 billion for AOL in 2015, then agreed to buy Yahoo's operating business for $4.83 billion in 2016. That price was cut to $4.48 billion after Yahoo disclosed its data breaches, and the sale closed in June 2017. The leftover shell, which mostly held stakes in Alibaba and Yahoo Japan, was renamed Altaba and wound down.
The brand kept running through all of it, including the billion dollars it spent on Tumblr.
Is Yahoo still in business in 2026?
Yes. Yahoo operates as a private company under Apollo, run by chief executive Jim Lanzone, who came to it after stints at Ask Jeeves, CBS Interactive and Tinder. Yahoo Mail, Yahoo Finance and Yahoo Sports are all still live, and AOL and TechCrunch sit under the same owner.
"Yahoo has always been the white whale of turnarounds for me," Lanzone told Fortune in March 2026, describing a company with deep roots and loyal users and a product engine that needed rebuilding. In the same interview he set out Yahoo's artificial intelligence plans, which run on models licensed from Anthropic rather than built in house.
What is not coming back is the search rivalry. Yahoo's organic results have come from Microsoft's Bing since the two companies signed a search deal in 2009, so a Yahoo search in 2026 is a Bing search, in the same way it was a Google search from 2000 to 2004. Yahoo has not run its own web index for well over a decade.
What did saying no actually cost Yahoo?
Run it on Yahoo's own numbers. Yahoo stock closed at an all-time high of $118.75 on January 3, 2000, at the top of the dot-com bubble. Seventeen years later the entire operating business, search included, went to Verizon for $4.48 billion. In 2021 Apollo bought Yahoo, AOL, TechCrunch and the rest for about $5 billion, the same figure Google's founders reportedly wanted for Google by itself in 2002.
Set against the 2008 bid the arithmetic looks worse. Yahoo's operating business fetched roughly a tenth of the $44.6 billion Microsoft had offered for the company nine years earlier, an offer the board turned down as too low.
The cheap lesson is that Yahoo missed one meeting in 1998. The accurate one is that Yahoo had at least three chances, in 1998, in 2000 and in 2002, and each time it treated search as a feature to rent rather than as the business itself. Google spent those same years turning search into the business, and Yahoo ended up renting its results from Microsoft instead.
Frequently Asked Questions
Did Yahoo really turn down Google for $1 million in 1998?
No primary record of it exists. The $1 million claim about Yahoo and Google rests on later retellings that disagree about who was offered Google in 1998, naming Yahoo, Excite or AltaVista depending on the version, and no filing, contemporary report or named Yahoo executive pins down a meeting or a price. The one first-hand account belongs to Excite's George Bell, who says the terms he saw were $750,000 plus about 1 percent of Excite.
Has Google ever bought Yahoo?
No. Google has never acquired Yahoo or a stake in it. Yahoo and Google were search partners from June 2000 until 2004, when Google supplied the results on Yahoo.com, and rivals before and after that. Yahoo is owned by Apollo Global Management, which bought 90 percent of it in a deal that closed on September 1, 2021.
Who owns Yahoo in 2026?
Apollo Global Management owns 90 percent of Yahoo and Verizon holds the other 10 percent, under a deal valued at about $5 billion that closed on September 1, 2021. Yahoo runs as a private company in 2026 with Jim Lanzone as chief executive, and Yahoo Mail, Yahoo Finance and Yahoo Sports are all still operating.