In a , Newmark said that his company's role in the collapse of the newspaper industry has been greatly exaggerated--mostly by newspapers. "I figure the biggest problems newspapers have these days have to do with fact-checking," he remarked.

In the mid-1990s the hottest search engine technology wasn't the work of Yahoo, Alta Vista, Lycos, or Hot Wired; it was the Open Text Web Index. Much like Google today, Open Text was lauded for its speed, accuracy, and comprehensiveness; by 1995 Open Text Corp. claimed that it had at that time. That year, Yahoo incorporated Open Text's search technology into its directory.

But two years after partnering with Yahoo, Open Text abandoned search and moved into enterprise content management. A year later . The missed opportunity? Not realizing how big search was going to be.

"If anything made Open Text special, it was that they came closer to having Google-like technology than anyone else in their time," says Steve Parker, a communications consultant who helped publicize Yahoo's launch of Open Text's search technology. "With a three-year lead on Google, you have to consider whether Google would have been forced to burn cash at a much faster pace, and if they might have run out of time to overtake the market leader. If things had gone differently, that might have been good enough to get [Open Text] to king of the hill."