Yahoo!

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Revision as of 17:50, 7 March 2007

The Yahoo! logo.

Yahoo! Inc. is an American global Internet services company. It operates an Internet portal and provides a full range of products and services including a search engine, the Yahoo! Directory and Yahoo! Mail. It was founded by Stanford graduate students Jerry Yang and David Filo in January of 1994 and incorporated on March 2, 1995. The company is headquartered in Sunnyvale, California.

According to Web trends companies among others Alexa Internet and Netcraft, Yahoo! has been the most visited website on the Internet with more than 412 million unique users. The global network of Yahoo! websites received 3.4 billion page views per day on average as of October 2005, making it one of the most visited U.S. websites.

History

Early History (1994-96)

In January 1994, Stanford graduate students Jerry Yang (楊致遠) and David Filo created a website named "Jerry's Guide to the World Wide Web". Jerry's Guide to the World Wide Web was a directory of other web sites, organized in a hierarchy, as opposed to a searchable index of pages.

In April 1994, "Jerry's Guide to the World Wide Web" was renamed "Yahoo!". Filo and Yang said they selected the name because they liked the word's general definition, as in Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift: "rude, unsophisticated, uncouth." The name can also be a backronym for "Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle".

By the end of 1994, Yahoo! had already received one million hits. Yang and Filo realized their website had massive business potential, and on 2 March 1995, Yahoo! was incorporated. On 12 April 1996, Yahoo! had its initial public offering, raising $33.8 million dollars, by selling 2.6 million shares at $13 each.

"Yahoo" had already been trademarked for barbecue sauce, knives (by EBSCO Industries) and human propelled watercraft (by Old Town Canoe Co.). Therefore, in order to get the trademark, Yang and Filo added the exclamation mark to the name. However, the exclamation mark is often incorrectly omitted when referring to Yahoo!.

Growth (1997-99)

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 8 March 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 12 October 1998. On 28 January 1999, Yahoo! acquired web hosting provider GeoCities. Another company Yahoo! acquired was eGroups, which became Yahoo! Groups after the acquisition on 28 June 2000. Yahoo! also launched Yahoo! Messenger on 21 July 1999.

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.

Dot-com bubble (2000-01)

On 3 January 2000, at the height of the Dot-com boom, Yahoo! stocks closed at an all-time high of $475.00 a share. 16 days later, shares in Yahoo! Japan became the first stocks in Japanese history to trade at over ¥100,000,000, reaching a price of 101.4 million yen ($962,140 at that time).

On 7 February 2000, Yahoo.com was brought to a halt for a few hours as it was the victim of a distributed denial of service attack (DDoS). On the next day, its shares rose about $16, or 4.5 percent as the failure was blamed on hackers rather than on an internal glitch, unlike a fault with eBay earlier that year.

During the dot-com boom, the cable news station CNBC also reported that Yahoo! and eBay were discussing a 50/50 merger. Although the merger never materialized the two companies decided to form a marketing/advertising alliance six years later in 2006.

On 26 June 2000, Yahoo! and Google signed an agreement which would make Google power searches made on yahoo.com.

Post dot-com bubble (2002-05)

Yahoo! was one of the few surviving companies after the dot-com bubble burst. Nevertheless, on September 26, 2001, Yahoo! stocks closed at an all-time low of $8.11.

Yahoo! formed partnerships with telecommunications and Internet providers to create content-rich broadband services to compete with AOL. On 3 June 2002, SBC and Yahoo! launched a national co-branded dial service. In July 2003, BT Openworld announced an alliance with Yahoo! On 23 August 2005, Yahoo! and Verizon launched an integrated DSL service.

In late 2002, Yahoo! began to bolster its search services by acquiring other search engines. In December 2002, Yahoo! acquired Inktomi, and in July 2003, it acquired Overture Services, Inc. and its subsidiaries AltaVista and AlltheWeb. On February 18, 2004, Yahoo! dropped Google-powered results and returned to using its own technology to provide search results.

Google then released Gmail, its webmail service offering 1 GB of storage, on 1 April 2004. Yahoo! responded by upgrading the storage of all free Yahoo! Mail accounts from 4 MB to 100 MB, and all Yahoo! Mail Plus accounts to 2 GB. On 9 July 2004, Yahoo! acquired e-mail provider Oddpost to add an Ajax interface to Yahoo! Mail Beta. Google also released Google Talk, a Voice over IP and instant messaging service, on 24 August 2005. On 13 October 2005, Yahoo! and Microsoft announced that Yahoo! Messenger and MSN Messenger would become interoperable.

Yahoo! continued acquiring companies to expand its range of services, particularly Web 2.0 services. Yahoo! Launch became Yahoo! Music on 9 February 2005. On 20 March 2005, Yahoo! purchased photo sharing service Flickr. On 29 March 2005, the company launched its blogging and social networking service Yahoo! 360°. In June 2005, Yahoo! acquired blo.gs, a service based on RSS feed aggregation. Yahoo! then bought online social event calendar Upcoming.org on 4 October 2005. Yahoo! acquired social bookmark site del.icio.us on 9 December 2005 and then playlist sharing community webjay on 9 January 2006.

The Future (2006-)

Yahoo! Next is an incubation ground for future Yahoo! technologies currently in their beta testing phase, similar to Google Labs. It contains forums for Yahoo! users to give feedback to assist in the development of these future Yahoo! technologies.

In early 2006, Yahoo! offered users the chance to beta test a new version of the Yahoo! homepage. However, it currently only supports Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox. Users of other browsers, such as Opera, have criticized Yahoo! for this move. Yahoo! says they intend to support additional browsers in the future.

Products and Services

Yahoo! provides a wide array of internet services that cater to most online activities. It operates the web portal [1] which provides contents including the latest news, Yahoo! Finance and gives users quick access to other Yahoo! services like Yahoo! Mail, Yahoo! Maps, Yahoo! Groups and Yahoo! Messenger.

Search

Yahoo! Search is the second largest search engine on the internet (to Google), Yahoo! also provides vertical search services such as Yahoo! Image, Yahoo! Video, Yahoo! Local, Yahoo! News, and Yahoo! Shopping Search.

Communication

Yahoo! provides internet communication services such as Yahoo! Mail and Yahoo! Messenger, Yahoo! Mail is the largest e-mail service in the world. Yahoo! also offers social networking services and user-generated content in products such as My Web, Yahoo! Personals, Yahoo! 360º, Yahoo! Photos, and Flickr.

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 ringtones, mobile games, and Yahoo! Photos for camera phones.

Content

Yahoo! partners with hundreds of premier content providers in products such as Yahoo! Sports, Yahoo! Finance, Yahoo! Music, Yahoo! Movies, Yahoo! News, 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.

Yahoo! has developed partnerships with different broadband providers such as SBC, Verizon, Bellsouth, Rogers Canada and British Telecom, offering a range of free and premium Yahoo! content and services to subscribers.

Commerce

Yahoo! offers commerce services such as Yahoo! Shopping, Yahoo! Autos, Yahoo! Auctions, and Yahoo! Travel, which enables users to gather relevant information and make commercial transactions and purchases online.

Small Business

Yahoo! Small Business enables small business owners and professionals to establish and grow a business presence with services such as Yahoo! Domains, Yahoo! Web Hosting, Yahoo! Merchant Solutions, Yahoo! Business Email, and Yahoo! Store. Yahoo! also offers HotJobs to help recruiters find the talent they seek.

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 in 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.

Important Events

• January 1994: Jerry Yang and David Filo create "Jerry's Guide to the World Wide Web" while studying at Stanford University.
• April 1994: "Jerry's Guide to the World Wide Web" is renamed "Yahoo!"
• March 1995: Yahoo! is incorporated.
• 1995: Ziff Davis Inc. launches the magazine Yahoo! Internet Life, initially as ZD Internet Life. The magazine was meant to accompany and complement the web site.
• April 12 1996: Yahoo! has Initial public offering, closing at $33.00, up 270% from the IPO price, after peaking at $43.00 for the day.
• June 8 1998: Yahoo! acquires Viaweb, co-founded by Paul Graham, which becomes Yahoo! Store.
• October 12 1998: Yahoo! acquires direct marketing company Yoyodyne Entertainment, Inc.
• January 28 1999: Yahoo! acquires Geocities.
• April 1 1999: Yahoo! acquires Broadcast.com.
• January 3 2000: Yahoo! stocks close at an all-time high of $475.00 (pre-split price) a share. The day before, it hit an intra-day high of $500.13 (pre-split price).
• January 19 2000: At the height of the Dot-com tech bubble, shares in Yahoo! Japan became the first stocks in Japanese history to trade at over ¥100,000,000, reaching a price of 101.4 million yen ($962,140 at that time).
• February 7 2000: Yahoo.com was brought to a halt for a few hours as it was the victim of a distributed denial of service attack (DDoS). On the next day, its shares rose about $16, or 4.5 percent as the failure was blamed on hackers rather than on an internal glitch, unlike a fault with eBay earlier that year.
• May 22 2000: A French judge ordered Yahoo! to ban Nazi-related sites from its search engine, and to stop to act as an intermediary on bids for objects with racist overtones. Yahoo! denied the French court's juridiction over a United States based company, and the tribunal's requests were finally abandoned in 2003. Yahoo! eventually quit voluntarily trading on Nazi and Ku Klux Klan bibelots.
• June 28 2000: Yahoo! acquires eGroups.
• March 7 2001: Yahoo! CEO Tim Koogle announces he will step down and remain only a company board member.
• April 17 2001: Terry Semel announced as the new Yahoo! CEO.
• September 26 2001 Yahoo! stocks close at an all-time low of $8.11. The day before, it hit an intra-day low of $8.02 (both figures are pre-split prices).
• December 27 2001: Yahoo! acquires HotJob.
• December 2002: Yahoo! Inc. starts acquisition of Inktomi Web search engine
• July, 2003: BT Openworld announces an alliance with Yahoo! -- Press Release
• July 2003, Yahoo! acquires Overture Services, Inc.
• January 19 2004: Yahoo! Inc. announces the formation of Yahoo! Research Labs, a research organization focusing on the invention of new technologies and solutions for Yahoo!. Yahoo!'s Head and Principal Scientist, Dr. Gary William Flake, leads the new organization. Dr. Flake has since left the company and now works at Microsoft.
• February 19 2004: Yahoo! drops Google-powered results, launching its own web-crawling algorithm and using its own site index after it had used Google's results for a long time.
• March 2004: Yahoo! launches its own search engine technology.
• March 1 2004: Yahoo! announces that it will practice paid inclusion for its search service. However, it also announced it would continue to rely mainly on a free web crawl for most of its search engine content.
• March 25 2004: Yahoo! acquires the European shopping search engine Kelkoo.
• July 9, 2004 Yahoo! acquires email provider Oddpost.
• November 4 2004: Yahoo! acquires game platform provider Stadeon.
• December 15 2004: Yahoo! launches beta version of its video search engine.
• February 9 2005 Yahoo! Launch is changed to Yahoo! Music, which still provides free music.
• February 15 2005 Yahoo! establishes its European Headquarters in Dublin, Ireland with the creation of 400 new jobs.
• February 28 2005 Yahoo! launches a developer network giving an API to most of its search verticals.
• March 2 2005 Yahoo! completes 10 years of corporate existence. To celebrate this, it gives free ice cream coupons at Baskin Robbins to its users.
• March 20, 2005 Yahoo! acquires photo sharing service Flickr
• March 29, 2005 Yahoo! launch blogging and social networking service Yahoo! 360°
• April 7, 2005 Wikimedia Foundation announces Yahoo! support
• May 26, 2005 Yahoo! announces its new PhotoMail service
• June 14, 2005 Yahoo! acquires VoIP provider DialPad Communications.
• July 15, 2005 Yahoo! announces Yahoo! Research Berkeley
• July 25, 2005 Yahoo! acquires widget engine Konfabulator
• August 11, 2005 Yahoo! acquires 40% of Alibaba.com for $1 billion US, and Alibaba will take over operation of Yahoo! China.
• August 23, 2005: Verizon and Yahoo! Launch Integrated DSL Service
• September 7, 2005. Yahoo! supplies information to People's Republic of China which then jails reporter Shi Tao, age 37, for 10 years. Yahoo! states that they were following Chinese law.
• October 4, 2005 Yahoo! purchases online social event calendar Upcoming.org. [2]
• October 17, 2005 Yahoo! buys British company Whereonearth Ltd which provides location technology.
• November 15, 2005 The sports section of My Yahoo! is hacked; titles such as "selfhood + conscience" and "aesthetic freedom" link to various pages at doublereflection.org.
• December 1, 2005 - Tivo and Yahoo! form a partnership where several Yahoo! features can be viewed on television via the Series2 TiVO set top box. [3], [4]
• December 8, 2005 Yahoo!7 announced for January 2006. Official Site
• December 9, 2005 Yahoo! acquires del.icio.us.
• January 9, 2006 Yahoo! acquires webjay
• February 12, 2006 Yahoo! Developer Network PHP Center launched.
• May 1, 2006 Yahoo! launches Yahoo! Tech.
• August 31, 2006 Yahoo! retires former frontpage.
• September 27, 2006 Yahoo! acquires online video editing site Jumpcut.
• September 29 to September 30, 2006 Yahoo! hosts an Open Hack Day (external site), featuring a musical performance by Beck
• December 5, 2006 Yahoo! announces a significant re-organization, including the departure of Dan Rosensweig (COO), Lloyd Braun and John Marcom. Sue Decker is promoted from CFO, and other business unit shifts are made.
• January 8, 2007 Yahoo! acquires MyBlogLog.
• February 5, 2007 Yahoo! launches a new search advertising system Panama.
• March 1, 2007 Localised New Zealand internet portal, Yahoo!Xtra, launches. Official Site