Sometimes a picture is worth 100 words. Note the "VA" up top, too. (For non-Valleys, Google Street View shows where Yahoo's famous roadside billboard sits along the San Francisco onramp to the Bay Bridge.) Yahoo's lavish parody of a Holiday Inn sign went up during the craziest part of the Web 1.0 boom. The message — "A nice place to stay on the Internet" — was crafted to counter the conventional wisdom that Web surfers used "portals" like Yahoo for a quick search, then clicked away to spend their time at "destination" sites somewhere else. Yahoo needed to convince investors and everyone else that its site was a destination, not a portal, and that it was "sticky" even though everyone eventually went somewhere else after a few minutes. Hence the Internet-motel metaphor. Pop quiz for geeks: Can someone calculate the monthly electric bill for this thing? (Photo by Ben Roodman)

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