What Yahoo didn’t know was how important the partnership would prove to be for Google’s overall product. Remember that Google’s algorithms improved in direct relation to the number of searches it performed and the amount of data Google’s computers could hoover up. The flood of queries from Yahoo not only took Google to the next level in terms of search market share, but many Google engineers would later credit the Yahoo traffic for fine-tuning Google’s search engine into its mature state. Google was essentially improving itself on the back of its biggest partner.
