Yahoo! Inc.is an American public corporation headquartered in Sunnyvale, California, (in Silicon Valley), that provides Internet services worldwide. The company is perhaps best known for its web portal, search engine, Yahoo! Directory, Yahoo! Mail, news, and social media websites and services. Yahoo! was founded by Jerry Yang and David Filo in January 1994 and was incorporated on March 1, 1995.
On January 13, 2009, Yahoo! appointed Carol Bartz, former executive chairperson of Autodesk, as its new chief executive officer and a member of the board of directors.
According to Web traffic analysis companies (including Compete.com, comScore, Alexa Internet, Netcraft, and Nielsen Ratings), the domain yahoo.com attracted at least 1.575 billion visitors annually by 2008. The global network of Yahoo! websites receives 3.4 billion page views per day on average as of October 2007. It is the second most visited website in the U.S., and in the world.
In January 1994, Jerry Yang and David Filo were Electrical Engineering graduate students at Stanford University. In April 1994, "Jerry and David's Guide to the World Wide Web" was renamed "Yahoo!", for which the official expansion is "Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle". Filo and Yang said they selected the name because they liked the word's general definition, which comes from Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift: "rude, unsophisticated and uncouth". Its URL was akebono.stanford.edu/yahoo.
By the end of 1994, Yahoo! had already received one million hits. The Yahoo! domain was created on January 18, 1995. Yang and Filo realized their website had massive business potential, and on March 1, 1995, Yahoo! was incorporated. On April 5, 1995, Michael Moritz of Sequoia Capital provided Yahoo! with two rounds of venture capital, raising approximately $3 million. On April 12, 1996, Yahoo! had its initial public offering, raising $33.8 million, by selling 2.6 million shares at $13 each.
Like many search engines and web directories, Yahoo! diversified into a Web portal. In the late 1990s, Yahoo!, MSN, Lycos, Excite and other Web portals were growing rapidly. Web portal providers rushed to acquire companies to expand their range of services, in the hope of increasing the time a user stays at the portal.
On March 8, 1997, Yahoo! acquired online communications company Four11. Four11's webmail service, Rocketmail, became Yahoo! Mail. Yahoo! also acquired ClassicGames.com and turned it into Yahoo! Games. Yahoo! then acquired direct marketing company Yoyodyne Entertainment, Inc. on October 12. On March 8, 1998, Yahoo! launched Yahoo! Pager, an instant messaging service that was renamed Yahoo! Messenger a year later. On January 28, 1999, Yahoo! acquired web hosting provider GeoCities. Another company Yahoo! acquired was eGroups, which became Yahoo! Groups after the acquisition on June 28, 2000.
When acquiring companies, Yahoo! often changed the relevant terms of service. For example, they claimed intellectual property rights for content on their servers, unlike the companies they acquired. As a result, many of the acquisitions were controversial and unpopular with users of the existing services.
Products and services
Yahoo! provides a wide array of internet services that cater to most online activities. It operates the web portal http://www.yahoo.com which provides content including the latest news, entertainment, and sports information, and gives users quick access to other Yahoo! services like Yahoo! Mail, Yahoo! Maps, Yahoo! Finance, Yahoo! Groups and Yahoo! Messenger. The majority of the product offerings are available globally in more than 20 languages.
Storing personal information
As of December 11, 2007, Google and the Microsoft's Live Search "store personal information for 18 months" and Yahoo! and AOL (Time Warner) "retain search requests for 13 months".
Communication
Yahoo! provides internet communication services such as Yahoo! Mail and Yahoo! Messenger, Yahoo! Mail is the largest e-mail service in the world with almost half the market share. In March, 2007, Yahoo! announced that their email service will offer unlimited storage beginning May 2007.
Yahoo! Mail premium service MailPlus provides additional functionality including POP/SMTP access to Yahoo! Mail accounts, although such functionality is already provided for free by Yahoo! competitor Gmail. Some MailPlus subscribers have reported difficulties in successfully cancelling their Mailplus (automatically renewed and paid by credit card) subscriptions. Although other areas of the Mailplus web interface appear to function correctly, a blank page appears when users select "cancel service" from the list of options to manage the service. It is unknown whether this error has been an accidental oversight by Yahoo! programmers, or a deliberate attempt to retain Mailplus subscription cash flows as long as possible.
Yahoo! also offers social networking services and user-generated content in products such as My Web, Yahoo! Personals, Yahoo! 360°, Flickr and Yahoo! Buzz.
Yahoo! Photos was shut down on September 20, 2007 in favor of Flickr. On October 16, 2007, Yahoo! announced that they will no longer provide support or perform bug fixes on Yahoo! 360° as they intend to abandon it in early 2008 in favor of a "universal profile" that will be similar to their Mash experimental system.
Content
Yahoo! partners with hundreds of premier content providers in products such as Yahoo! Sports, Yahoo! Finance, Yahoo! Music, Yahoo! Movies, Yahoo! News, Yahoo! Answers and Yahoo! Games to provide media contents and news. Yahoo! also provides a personalization service, My Yahoo!, which enables users to collect their favorite Yahoo! features, content feeds, and information into a single page.
On March 31, 2008 Yahoo! launched web portal shine.yahoo.com another Yahoo! property dedicated to women between the ages of 25 and 54. Yahoo! called this demographic undeserved by current Yahoo! properties. With Shine Yahoo! will expand its offerings in parenting, sex and love, healthy living, food, career, money, entertainment, fashion, beauty home life and astrology.
Co-branded Internet services
Yahoo! has developed partnerships with different broadband providers such as AT&T (via BellSouth & SBC), Verizon Communications, Rogers Communications and British Telecoms, offering a range of free and premium Yahoo! content and services to subscribers.
Mobile
Yahoo! Mobile includes services for on-the-go messaging, such as email, instant messaging, and moblogging; information, such as search and alerts; and fun and games, including ring tones, mobile games, and Yahoo! Photos for camera phones. These require software to be installed on the user's device.
OneSearch
Yahoo! introduced its Internet search system, called oneSearch, developed for mobile phones on March 20, 2007. The company's officials stated that in distinction from ordinary Web searches, Yahoo!'s new service presents a list of actual information, which may include: news headlines, images from Yahoo!'s Flickr photos site, business listings, local weather and links to other sites. Instead of showing only, for example, popular movies or some critical reviews, oneSearch lists local theaters that at the moment are playing a certain movie, user ratings and news headlines regarding the movie. A zip code or city name is required for Yahoo! oneSearch to start delivering local search results.
The results of a Web search are listed on a single page and are prioritized into categories. The list of results is based on calculations that Yahoo! computers make on certain information the user is seeking.
Yahoo! has announced they also plan to adopt Novarra's mobile content transcoding service for the oneSearch platform.
Commerce
Yahoo! offers commerce services such as Yahoo! Shopping, Yahoo! Autos, Yahoo! Real Estate and Yahoo! Travel, which enables users to gather relevant information and make commercial transactions and purchases online. In addition, Yahoo! offers an e-commerce platform called Yahoo! Merchant Solutions (also known as Yahoo! Store) and hosts more Top 500 internet retailers than any other hosted e-commerce solution. Yahoo! Auctions were discontinued in 2007 except for Asia.
Small business
Yahoo! provides services such as Yahoo! Domains, Yahoo! Web Hosting, Yahoo! Merchant Solutions, Yahoo! Business Email, and Yahoo! Store to small business owners and professionals allowing them to build their own online stores using Yahoo!'s tools.
Advertising
Yahoo! Search Marketing provides services such as Sponsored Search, Local Advertising, and Product/Travel/Directory Submit that let different businesses advertise their products and services on the Yahoo! network. Yahoo! Publisher Network is an advertising tool for online publishers to place advertisements relevant to their content to monetize their websites.
Yahoo! launched its new Internet advertisement sales system on February 5, 2007 called Panama. It allows advertisers to bid for search terms based on their popularity to display their ads on search results pages. The system takes bids, ad quality, click-through rates and other factors into consideration in determining how ads are ranked on search results pages. Through Panama, Yahoo! aims to provide more relevant search results to users, a better overall experience, as well as increase monetization -- to earn more from the ads it shows.
On April 7, 2008, Yahoo! announced Yahoo! AMP!, an online advertising management platform. The platform seeks to simplify advertising sales by unifying buyer and seller markets. The service is scheduled for release in quarter 3 of 2008.
Yahoo! Next
Yahoo! Next is an incubation ground for future Yahoo! technologies currently in their beta testing phase. It contains forums for Yahoo! users to give feedback to assist in the development of these future Yahoo! technologies.
Yahoo! BOSS
Yahoo! Search BOSS is a new service that allows developers to build search applications based on Yahoo!'s search technology. Early Partners in the program include Hakia, Me.dium, Delver and Daylife.
