Yahoo!

   

Yahoo! corporate logo

Yahoo! (NASDAQ: YHOO (http://quotes.nasdaq.com/asp/SummaryQuote.asp?symbol=YHOO&selected=YHOO)) is an Internet portal and Web directory. It was founded by Stanford graduate students David Filo and Jerry Yang in January 1994 and incorporated in March 1995. The company is headquartered in Sunnyvale, California.

According to Alexa Internet, a web trends company, Yahoo! is the most visited website on the Internet today. The global network of Yahoo! websites received 3 billion page views per day as of October 2004.

History

Screenshot of Yahoo!'s homepage November 13th, 2004
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Screenshot of Yahoo!'s homepage November 13th, 2004

The Web site started out as "Jerry's Guide to the World Wide Web" but eventually received a new moniker with the help of a dictionary. The name Yahoo! is an acronym for "Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle," but Filo and Yang insist they selected the name because they liked the general definition of a yahoo, as in Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift: "rude, unsophisticated, uncouth." Yahoo! itself first resided on Yang's student workstation, "Akebono," while the software was lodged on Filo's computer, "Konishiki"—both named after legendary sumo wrestlers. The "yet another" phrasing goes back at least to the Unix utility yacc, whose name is an acronym for "yet another compiler compiler".

Yahoo! had its initial public offering on April 12, 1996, selling 2.6 million shares at $13 each.

As Yahoo!'s popularity has increased, so has the range of features it offers, making it a kind of one-stop shop for all the popular activities of the Internet. These now include: a web-based e-mail service, an instant messaging client, a very popular mailing list service (Yahoo! Groups), online gaming and chat, various news and information portals, online shopping and auction facilities, and an online payment system (similar to PayPal) called Yahoo! Paydirect. Many of these are based at least in part on previously independent services, which Yahoo! has acquired - such as the popular GeoCities free web-hosting service, Rocketmail, and various competing mailing list providers such as eGroups. Many of these take-overs were controversial and unpopular with users of the existing services, as Yahoo! often changed the relevant terms of service. An example of this would be their claiming intellectual property over content on their servers, which the old companies had not.

Yahoo! has now begun making partnerships with telecommunications and Internet providers - such as BT in the UK, Rogers in Canada and SBC in the US - to create content-rich broadband services to rival those offered by AOL. The company offers a branded credit card, Yahoo! Visa, through a partnership with First USA.

Beginning in late 2002, Yahoo! quietly began to bolster its search services by acquiring competing technologies. In December 2002, it acquired Inktomi, and in July 2003, it acquired Overture Services, Inc., and through it, search sites AltaVista and AlltheWeb. On February 18, 2004, Yahoo! dropped Google-powered results, returning to its own results after a long time.

Important events

Please note that this list is merely partial.

  • 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.
  • December 2002: Yahoo! Inc. starts acquisition of Inktomi Web search engine
  • July 2003, 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.
  • February 19 2004: Yahoo! dropped Google-powered results, returning to its own results after a long time.
  • March 2004: Yahoo! launches its own search engine technology
  • March 1 2004: Yahoo! announces (as cited in the New York Times article listed in the "References" section) that it will practice paid inclusion for its search service.

See also: List of websites

Yahoo!-owned services

This is a partial list. For a complete listing of the services see List of Yahoo! services (http://docs.yahoo.com/docs/family/more/).

References

External links



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