Yahoo History

Yahoo! began as a student hobby and evolved into a global brand that has changed the way people communicate with each other, find and access information and purchase things. The two founders of Yahoo!, David Filo and Jerry Yang, Ph.D. candidates in Electrical Engineering at Stanford University, started their guide in a campus trailer in February 1994 as a way to keep track of their personal interests on the Internet. Before long they were spending more time on their home-brewed lists of favorite links than on their doctoral dissertations. Eventually, Jerry and David's lists became too long and unwieldy, and they broke them out into categories. When the categories became too full, they developed subcategories ... and the core concept behind Yahoo! was born.

The Web site started out as "Jerry and David'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: "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.

Jerry and David soon found they were not alone in wanting a single place to find useful Web sites. Before long, hundreds of people were accessing their guide from well beyond the Stanford trailer. Word spread from friends to what quickly became a significant, loyal audience throughout the closely-knit Internet community. Yahoo! celebrated its first million-hit day in the fall of 1994, translating to almost 100 thousand unique visitors.

Due to the torrent of traffic and enthusiastic reception Yahoo! was receiving, the founders knew they had a potential business on their hands. In March 1995, the pair incorporated the business and met with dozens of Silicon Valley venture capitalists. They eventually came across Sequoia Capital, the well-regarded firm whose most successful investments included Apple Computer, Atari, Oracle and Cisco Systems. They agreed to fund Yahoo! in April 1995 with an initial investment of nearly $2 million.

Realizing their new company had the potential to grow quickly, Jerry and David began to shop for a management team. They hired Tim Koogle, a veteran of Motorola and an alumnus of the Stanford engineering department, as chief executive officer and Jeffrey Mallett, founder of Novell's WordPerfect consumer division, as chief operating officer. They secured a second round of funding in Fall 1995 from investors Reuters Ltd. and Softbank. Yahoo! launched a highly-successful IPO in April 1996 with a total of 49 employees.

Today, Yahoo! Inc. is a leading global Internet communications, commerce and media company that offers a comprehensive branded network of services to more than 345 million individuals each month worldwide. As the first online navigational guide to the Web, www.yahoo.com is the leading guide in terms of traffic, advertising, household and business user reach. Yahoo! is the No. 1 Internet brand globally and reaches the largest audience worldwide. The company also provides online business and enterprise services designed to enhance the productivity and Web presence of Yahoo!'s clients. These services include Corporate Yahoo!, a popular customized enterprise portal solution; audio and video streaming; store hosting and management; and Web site tools and services. The company's global Web network includes 25 World properties. Headquartered in Sunnyvale, Calif., Yahoo! has offices in Europe, Asia, Latin America, Australia, Canada and the United States.

Yahoo Today

Today's Highlight in History:

On May 11, 1981, legendary reggae artist Bob Marley died in a Miami hospital at age 36.

On this date:

In 1647, Peter Stuyvesant arrived in New Amsterdam to become governor of New Netherland.

In 1811, conjoined twins Chang and Eng Bunker were born in Siam (now Thailand), giving rise to the term "Siamese twins."

In 1858, Minnesota became the 32nd state of the Union.

In 1911, actor-comedian Phil Silvers was born in New York City.

In 1946, the first CARE packages arrived in Europe, at Le Havre, France.

In 1950, President Harry S. Truman formally dedicated the Grand Coulee Dam in Washington state.

In 1960, Israeli agents captured Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann in Buenos Aires, Argentina.

In 1973, charges against Daniel Ellsberg for his role in the "Pentagon Papers" case were dismissed by Judge William M. Byrne, who cited government misconduct.

In 1981, the Andrew Lloyd Webber musical "Cats," based on T.S. Eliot's "Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats," opened in London.

In 1996, an Atlanta-bound ValuJet DC-9 caught fire shortly after takeoff from Miami and crashed into the Florida Everglades, killing all 110 people on board.

Ten years ago: A jury in Pittsburgh sentenced Richard Baumhammers to death for killing five people in a racially motivated shooting rampage. (Baumhammers is appealing his sentence.) Miss Puerto Rico Denise Quinones August was crowned Miss Universe. Douglas Adams, author of "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy," died in Santa Barbara, Calif., at age 49.

Five years ago: Lawmakers demanded answers after a USA Today report that the National Security Agency was secretly collecting records of millions of ordinary Americans' phone calls; President George W. Bush sought to assure Americans their civil liberties were being "fiercely protected." A priest was convicted in Toledo, Ohio, of murdering a nun; the Rev. Gerald Robinson was immediately sentenced to 15 years to life in prison for the 1980 death of Sister Margaret Ann Pahl. Former heavyweight champion Floyd Patterson died in New Paltz, N.Y., at age 71.

One year ago: British Prime Minister Gordon Brown resigned, ending 13 years of the Labour Party government and paving the way for Conservative David Cameron to become Britain's next leader. Italian designer Giuliana Coen Camerino, credited with making handbags a fashion item, died in Venice at age 90.

Today's Birthdays: Comedian Mort Sahl is 84. Rock singer Eric Burdon (The Animals; War) is 70. Actress Shohreh Aghdashloo (SHOH'-reh ahg-DAHSH'-loo) is 59. Actress Frances Fisher is 59. Actor Boyd Gaines is 58. Country musician Mark Herndon (Alabama) is 56. Actress Martha Quinn is 52. Country singer-musician Tim Raybon (The Raybon Brothers) is 48. Actor Jeffrey Donovan is 43. Country musician Keith West (Heartland) is 43. Actor Coby Bell is 36. Cellist Perttu Kivilaakso (PER'-tuh KEE'-wee-lahk-soh) is 33. Actor Jonathan Jackson is 29. Actor Cory Monteith (TV: "Glee") is 29.

Thought for Today: "We carry our nemesis within us: yesterday's self-admiration is the legitimate father of today's feeling of guilt." — Dag Hammarskjold, U-N Secretary-General (1905-1961).

Yahoo Products and Services

All of these Yahoo services could be accessed by the user when the user opens a web portal from Yahoo.

Search mode

Yahoo has a search mode services, among others Yahoo! Image, Yahoo Video, Yahoo Local, Yahoo News, and Yahoo Shopping Search.

Communication

Yahoo provides internet services in the areas of communication, such as Messenger and Yahoo Mail. In addition, Yahoo also offers social networking services and user-generated content such as My Web, Yahoo Personals, Yahoo 360 °, Delicious, Flickr, and Yahoo Buzz.

Content

Yahoo! work with many content providers in products such as Yahoo! Sports, Yahoo Finance, Yahoo Music, Yahoo Movies, Yahoo News, Yahoo Answers and Yahoo Games to provide media content and news. Yahoo also provides a personalization service, My Yahoo, which allows users to combine their favorite Yahoo! features, content and information into one page. At the date March 31, 2008, Yahoo launched Shine, a site designed for women ages 25 to 54 years for those seeking information and advice online.

Mobile

Yahoo! Mobile offers a service on-the-go messaging, such as email, instant messaging, and mobile blogging, information services, search and reminders, entertainment, ringtones, and Yahoo Photos for camera phones. Yahoo also introduced a search system, called oneSearch on March 20, 2007, which was developed specifically for mobile phones. Yahoo said that its service is different from regular web search, because it presents a list of actual information, which include: news headlines, images from the photo site Flickr Yahoo!, business listings, local weather and links to other sites. To start using this service, Yahoo oneSearch require postal code or city name where the user is to be able to provide local search results. The search results are listed on a single page and organized by priority into categories. List results are based on the results of Yahoo’s calculation of the specific information sought by users. To service this oneSearch, Yahoo’s mobile content transcoding using Navarra.

Trade

Yahoo! offers trade services like Yahoo! Shopping, Yahoo Autos, Yahoo Real Estates, and Yahoo Travel, which enables users to gather relevant information and make commercial transactions and purchases online. In addition, Yahoo also offers e-commerce platform called Yahoo Merchant Solutions (also known with Yahoo Store). Auctions Yahoo! itself has been discontinued in 2007, except for parts of 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 that allows them to build their own online store with a device that is owned by Yahoo. Yahoo also offers HotJobs to help employment seekers to find employment they are seeking.

Advertising

Yahoo! Search Marketing provides services such as Sponsored Search, Local Advertising, and Product / Travel / Directory Submit for businessmen to advertise their products and services in network Yahoo. Yahoo! Publisher Network is an advertising tool for online publishers to place relevant ads with their content to make their Web sites. On February 5, 2007, Yahoo launched an advertising sales system in the new Internet, called Panama. This allows advertisers to display their ads to search terms based on their popularity so that later their ads appear on search results pages. Through Panama, Yahoo aims to provide relevant search results for users, better experience, as well as increased monetasi-to get more results than the appearance of an advertisement. On April 7, 2008, Yahoo announced the APT from Yahoo, which initially called AMP. APT is an online advertising management platform. This platform aims to simplify advertising sales by bringing together buyers and sellers market. This service was launched in September 2008.

Yahoo! Next

Next is an incubation Yahoo! basis of a future where Yahoo’s technology is now in beta testing stage. Yahoo! Next contain user forum on Yahoo where Yahoo users can provide feedback to assist the development of future Yahoo technologies. Next Yahoo! was created by Jerry Page and David Shin.

Yahoo! BOSS

Yahoo! Search BOSS is a service that allows developers to build search applications based on Yahoo’s search technology. Initial partners in this program is Hakia, Me.dium, Delver, Daylife, and Yebol.

Yahoo! Meme

Yahoo! Meme is a beta social services, similar to the popular social networking Twitter and Jaiku.

Yahoo! Koprol

Yahoo! Koprol an Indonesia based social networking sites such as the GPS without a GPS device

Acquisitions made by Yahoo

On March 8, 1997, Yahoo acquired online communications company Four11. Webmail service owned by Four11, Rocketmail, changed its name to Yahoo! Mail. Yahoo also acquired ClassicGames.com and turn it into Yahoo! Games on March 13, 1998. On March 8, 1998, Yahoo launched Yahoo Pager, an instant messaging service, which later changed its name to the Messenger a year later. On January 28, 1999, Yahoo acquired web hosting provider GeoCities. Another company was acquired by Yahoo eGroups, which became Yahoo! Groups. These acquisitions occurred on June 28, 2000.

Then, to improve its search service, Yahoo other search engines acquired in 2002′s. In December 2002, Yahoo acquired Inktomi Corporation. In February 2005, Yahoo acquired Konfabulator and renamed it Yahoo! Widgets, a desktop application. In July 2003, Yahoo acquired Overture Services. Inc. and its subsidiaries AltaVista and AlltheWeb. On July 9, 2004, Yahoo acquired the service provider electronic mail (email) Oddpost to add Ajax capabilities to existing Yahoo! Mail.

Yahoo also made acquisitions to increase its services on Web 2.0 services. Yahoo! LAUNCHcast be Yahoo! Music on February 9, 2005. On March 20, 2005, Yahoo purchased photo sharing service, Flickr. On March 29, 2005, the company launched its blogging and social networking services Yahoo! 360 °. In June 2005, Yahoo acquired blo.gs, a service based on the aggregation of RSS feeds. Yahoo! later bought online social event calendar Upcoming.org on October 4, 2005. Yahoo also acquired del.icio.us on October 9, 2005 and then an online music store Webjay on January 9, 2006 which eventually became Yahoo! Music.

On January 17, 2006, Yahoo acquires SearchFox, a web search engine, to improve Yahoo! Search. On September 27, 2006, Yahoo acquired Jumpcut.com and turn it into Yahoo! Video. Then, on 17 November 2006, Kenet Works was acquired by Yahoo to make Yahoo! Mobile. On 29 April820 2007 Yahoo acquired Right Media an online advertising service provider, which was later renamed Yahoo! Search Marketing. On September 14, 2007, was acquired BuzzTracker to create Yahoo! News. Not satisfied with its services, Yahoo acquired Maven Networks and Xoopit, respectively to improve services Yahoo! Video and Yahoo Mail. Somersault, a social networking native to Indonesia did not escape the attention of Yahoo. On 25 May 2010, Koprol acquired by Yahoo.

Yahoo! Messenger for PC

Yahoo Messanger allows you to exchange instant messages and PC-to-PC voice calls with your online friends. If you subscribe to the Phone In or Phone Out premium services, you can also use Messenger to make or receive calls from regular telephones.

You must be a registered Yahoo! user in order to use Yahoo! Messenger. Yahoo! Messenger establishes a connection to the Internet when it is active -- much like a browser does -- in order for communications to be received and transmitted.

Conversation History, Access, and Search

• You may now archive Yahoo! instant messages along with Yahoo! Mail messages and search them together (in addition to Voice Mail, SMS, call history, and more).
• For users that have elected to archive their messages, Yahoo! Messenger will now archive messages on Yahoo! servers to establish and maintain this archive.
• Messages stored on Yahoo! servers in this manner are accessible from any computer system or device able to use the latest versions of Yahoo! Messenger for PC.
• You can view your Yahoo! Messenger conversation history and Yahoo! Mail archive (if they are tied to the same user ID) on Messenger through “Conversation History” in your settings.
• You can turn off this feature for instant messages at any time by selecting “Do not keep a record of my conversations”.
• Please be aware that even if you choose not to save your message history, users with whom you communicate may opt to use the functionality available in their version of Messenger to save the communications and your conversations may be saved on Yahoo! servers, just like email.
• You can delete your archived messages by selecting the message, and clicking on the “Delete” button. However, this does not delete any of your conversations saved by other users.
• Yahoo! may analyze instant messages you elect to archive in order to provide personally relevant product features, content, and advertising, and spam and malware detection.
• Messenger automatically identifies phone numbers and email addresses included in messages so you can quickly save them to your Yahoo! Address Book or take other actions, such as sending an email. This is a function carried out by the Messenger client on your computer and is not done by Yahoo! servers.
• Messenger gives you the opportunity to report instant messages you receive as spam. If you choose to report spam, Yahoo! will be sent information about the conversation including the Yahoo! ID of the member being reported, text of the conversation, and your Yahoo! ID.
• By using Messenger, you may choose to make some of your personal information public or you may choose to share some of your personal information with others.
• If you post personal information online that is accessible to the public, you may receive unsolicited messages from other parties in return.
• Messenger sometimes uses a peer-to-peer connection during its operation, including times when you may be using it for instant messaging (text conversations), file sharing, PC-to-PC calling and webcam streaming. Peer-to-peer means that your computer connects directly to the other user's computer in the conversation without needing to go through Yahoo! servers. As such, your IP address is available to users you share a peer-to-peer connection with.
• You can edit your Messenger settings and preferences through the Messenger menu.
• You can delete your archived messages by selecting the message, and clicking on the “Delete” button. However, this does not delete any of your conversations saved by other users.

Yahoo! Kids

Yahoo! Kids (formerly known as Yahooligans!) is a public web portal provided by yahoo to find age appropriate online content for children between the ages of 6 and 12. The website can be used for both educational and entertainment purposes. It was established in March 1996 by yahoo to give children a venue to find appropriate, safe Internet content. Yahoo! Kids is the oldest online search directory for children.

History

Yahoo! Kids, originally known as Yahooligans!, was founded in March 1996 by Yahoo to provide children with a venue to find appropriate, safe Internet content.The website is the oldest online search directory for children. The website's editors stated that Yahoo! Kids is "cool, goofy, fascinating, fun, hysterical, philosophical, surprising, sedate, silly, seismic, popular, obscure, useful, and interesting". In October 1999, The New Yark Times reporter Michella Slatalla noted that Yahooligans! was a "heavily trafficked site", with 463,000 visitors accessing the website in August 1999.

In 2004, Yahoo! entered into a partnership with DIC Entertainment to establish Yahooligans! TV, which gives users access to DIC's 3,000 hours of animated children programmes . DIC Entertainment president Brad Brooks stated that the partnership "offer[s] advertisers a cross platform purchase". Yahoo! sells the ads and the revenue from the commercials is split between the two companies.

Content

The website can be used for both educational and entertainment purposes. The Yahoo! Kids' portal has directories such as "Around the World", "Arts & Entertainment", "Computers & Games", "School Bell", "Science & Nature", and "Sports & Recreation". Under the directory "School-Bell", the category "Homework Answers" allows children to access websites pertaining to school subjects such as geography, history, and math.

The homepage also displays links to games, jokes, news, and sports. For the latter three, the content is crafted for those younger than 12. Games provided on the Yahoo! Kids website include Chainese Checkers, Go Flash , and Checkers . Age-appropriate offsite games are also accessible via the links under the "games" tab. The website offers an instant messaging gadget that allows children to participate in live chats with notable people. Bill Clinton , J.K.Rowling and Bill Nye the Science Guy have been guests in the chats.

In June 2005, reviewer Gail Junion-Metz of the School Library Journal praised Yahooligans! Games, writing that it is "[o]ne of the best spots to find kid-appropriate games that don't require downloads". In a September 1998 review of the website, John Hilvert and Linda Bruce of PC user wrote that "Yahooligans is one of the best specialized engines, particularly for homework answers."

In July 2007, reviewer Holly Gunn of Teacher Librarian praised Yahoo! Kids for its helpful, comprehensible results but criticized it, writing that it had too many ads and that the "interface is too busy and filled with too many diversions. Useful material is buried amidst entertainment".

Yahoo in International

Yahoo! is known across the world with its multi-lingual interface. The site is available in over 20 languages, including English. The official directory for all of the Yahoo! International sites is world.yahoo.com

Each of the international sites are wholly owned by Yahoo!, with the exception of Yahoo! Japan, in which it holds a 34.79% minority stake and Yahoo-7 in Australia which is a 50-50 agreement between Yahoo! and the Seven Network . Historically, Yahoo! entered into joint venture agreements with Softbank for the major European sites (UK, France, Germany) and well as Korea and Japan. In November 2005, Yahoo! purchased the minority interests that SoftBank owned in Europe and Korea.

Yahoo! holds a 40% stake in Alibaba , which manages a web portal in China using the Yahoo! brand name. Yahoo! in the USA does not have direct control over the operations of Alibaba, which operates as a completely independent company.

In 2008, Darren Petterson, business development director for Yahoo! Europe confirmed that Yahoo! was going to launch a Romanian version of their website by the end of the year, however, due to the financial crises at that time, those plans were frozen. In February 2010, new reports appeared in the Romanian media claiming that the portal will finally launch by June the same year, as some services like Yahoo! Mail and Yahoo! Mobile are already translated into Romanian. On 8 March 2011 Yahoo! launched its Romania local service.

In 2000, Yahoo! was taken to court in France by parties seeking to prevent French citizens from purchasing memorabilia relating to the Nani party. In March 2004, Yahoo! launched a paid inclusion program whereby commercial websites are guaranteed listings on the Yahoo! search engine, but Yahoo! discontinued the paid inclusion / search submit program at the end of 2009. Yahoo! has also been criticized for providing ads via the Yahoo! ad network to companies who display them through spyware and adware.

Yahoo! as well as other search engines, have cooperated with the Chinese government in censoring. search results. In April 2005, dissident Shi Tao was sentenced to 10 years in prison for "providing state secrets to foreign entities" as a result of being identified by IP address by Yahoo! The extent of Yahoo's foreknowledge of Shi's fate is disputed by Yahoo! General Counsel and human rights organizations. Human rights groups also accuse Yahoo! of aiding authorities in the arrest of dissident Li Zhi. In September 2003, dissident Wang Xioning was convicted of charges of "incitement to subvert state power" and sentenced to ten years in prison. Yahoo! helped authorities to identify posts he had made in a Yahoo! group calling for an end to single-party rule. Both Xiaoning's wife and the World Organization for Human Rights sued Yahoo! under human rights laws on behalf of Wang and Shi.

As a result of media scrutiny relating to Internet child predators and a lack of significant ad revenues, Yahoo!'s "user created" chatrooms were closed down in June 2005. On May 25, 2006, Yahoo!'s image search was criticized for bringing up sexually explicit images even when SafeSearch was on. Yahoo! is a 40% owner of Alibaba Group , which was previously a subject of controversy for allowing the sale of shark-derived products. Nevertheless, the company banned the sale of shark fin products on all its e-commerce platforms in January 1, 2009. On November 30, 2009, Yahoo! was criticized by the Electronic Frontier Foundation for sending a DMCA notice to whistle-blower website "Cryptome" for publicly posting details, prices, and procedures on obtaining private information pertaining to Yahoo!'s subscribers.

Products and services of Yahoo

Storing personal information and tracking usage

Working with comscore ,The New Yark Times found that Yahoo! is able to collect far more data about webusers than its competitors from its websites and advertising network. By one measure, on average Yahoo! had the potential in December 2007 to build a profile of 2,500 records per month about each of its visitors.

As of May 22, 2008, an article in Computer World states that Yahoo has a 2-petabyte, specially built data warehouse , which it uses to analyze the behavior of its half-billion Web visitors per month, processing 24 billion events a day. Yahoo claimed it is expected to grow in multiples of 10 petabytes by 2009 and that this database is the largest in the world. In contrast the Internal Revenue Services (IRS) database of all US taxpayers weighs in at only 150 TB.

As of December 18, 2008, Yahoo! retains search requests for a period of 13 months. However, In response to European Regulators Yahoo scrambles the last eight digits of a users IP address after three months, rendering them partially anonymous.

Communication

Yahoo! provides Internet communication services such as Yahoo Messenger and Yahoo Mail . In March 2007, Yahoo! announced that their e-mail service would offer unlimited storage beginning May 2007.

Yahoo! also offers social networking services and user-generated content in products such as My Web, Yahoo personals , Yahoo 360 degrees , Delicious , Flicker and Yahoo Buzz . In December 2010, reports emerged that Yahoo! would be shutting down Yahoo Buzz , My Blog Log , Delicious and a handful of other products.

Yahoo! Photos was shut down on September 2 , 2007, in favor of Flickr. On October 16 , 2007, Yahoo! announced that they would no longer provide support or perform bug fixes on Yahoo! 360° as they intended 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 numerous content providers in products such as Yahoo Sports , Yahoo Finance , Yahoo Music, Yahoo Movies , Yahoo News , Yahoo Answers and Yahoo Games to provide media content and news. Yahoo! also provides a personalization service, My Yahoo!, which enables users to combine their favorite Yahoo! features, content feeds and information onto a single page.

On March 31, 2008, Yahoo! launched Shine, a site tailored for women seeking online information and advice between the ages of 25 and 54.

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 Telecom , offering a range of free and premium Yahoo! content and services to subscribers.

Mobile Services

Yahoo Mobile offers services for email, instant messaging and mobile bloging ; information services, search and alerts; entertainment, ring tones, and Yahoo! Photos for camera phones.

Yahoo! also 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! uses Novarra 's mobile content transcoding service for the oneSearch platform.

On October 8, 2010, Yahoo! announced plans to brings video chat to iPhones and Android-based phones via its popular Yahoo Messenger instant messaging service.

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. 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 Marketting 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, clickthrough 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 APT from rates , which was originally called AMP! from Yahoo!, an online advertising management platform. The platform seeks to simplify advertising sales by unifying buyer and seller markets. The service was launched in September 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. It was created by Jerry Page and David Shin.

Yahoo! BOSS

Yahoo Search Boss is a service that allows developers to build search applications based on Yahoo!'s search technology. Early Partners in the program include Harika , Mediam , Delver , Daylife and Yebol. On October 8, 2010, The Yahoo Search Blog announced BOSS is switching, as expected, to a paid model. They will charge on a cost-per-query model where the price will vary from $0.40 to $0.75 CPM (cost per 1000 BOSS queries). The price, as Yahoo explained, will depend on if you are querying web, image, news or other information. Yahoo said they plan on offering BOSS v1, the free version, for free 60 days after BOSS v2, the paid version, is launched – which is expected in early 2011.

Yahoo! Meme

Yahoo Meme is a beta social service, similar to the popular social networking sites Twitter and Jaiku .

Yahoo! Koprol

Yahoo Koprol is a Indonesian social networking based on location like GPS without any GPS devices. Koprol is bought by Yahoo in May 2011 with 75,000 users and in early July 2011 when Koprol has one year old the users of Koprol have achieved 1.5 million users.

Y!Connect

Y!Connect is a feature that enables individuals to leave comments in online publication boards by using their Yahoo ID, instead of having to register with each individual publication. The Wall Street Journal reported that Yahoo plans to mimic this strategy used by rival Facebook Inc. to help drive traffic to its site.

Closed down services

Geocities was a popular web hosting service founded in 1994. At one point it was the third-most-browsed site on the World Wide Web. Yahoo! purchased Geocities in 1999, and ten years later, the web host was closed, deleting millions of web pages in the process. A great deal of information was lost but many of those sites and pages have been mirrored at the Internet Archive ,"OOcities.com", and other such databases.

Yahoo Go , a Java-based phone application with access to most of Yahoo! services, was closed down on January 12, 2010.

Yahoo 360 degrees was a blogging/social networking beta service launched in March 2005 by Yahoo! and closed on July 13, 2009. Yahoo! Mash beta was another social service closed after one year of operation prior to leaving beta status.

Yahoo! Photos was shut down on September 20, 2007, in favor of integration with flicker . Yahoo Tech was a website that provided product information and setup advice to users. Yahoo! launched the website in May 2006. On March 11, 2010, Yahoo! closed down the service and redirected users to Yahoo!'s technology news section. Other discontinued services include Farechase, My Web, Audio Search, Pets, Live, Kickstart, Briefcase, and Yahoo! for Teachers.

Hotjobs was acquired by and merged with monster.com .

Twitter slide leak on upcoming changes to Yahoo

On December 15, 2010, one day after Yahoo announced layoffs of 4% of its workers across their portfolio, my bloglog founder Eric Marcoullier posted a slide from a Yahoo employee on Twitter. The slide was visible during an employee-only strategy webcast indicating changes in Yahoo's offerings.

11 other properties were listed that Yahoo was interested in developing into feature sites within the portal to take the place of the "Sunset" and "Merge" vacancies, including the prior feature services (before the New Yahoo Mail was launched), were Yahoo Address Book, Calendar, and Notepad. Yahoo's Chief Product Officer and Executive Vice President Blake Irving unofficially responded to the tweet implying that whoever sent him that particular slide is fired.

The blog on delicious released a post by chiris yah after the leak, detailing that "Sunset" in their case doesn't necessarily mean they are closing down, and that other possibilities – including Delicious leaving Yahoo (through sale or spinoff) – are still on the table and that Delicious will not be closing down at this time; "We can only imagine how upsetting the news coverage over the past 24 hours has been to many of you. Speaking for our team, we were very disappointed by the way that this appeared in the press." On April 27, 2011, an announcement said that Delicious has been sold to Avos by Yahoo!

Yahoo! Buzz was closed down on April 21, 2011 with no official announcement by Yahoo!

Yahoo! announced it will close down MyBlogLog on May 24, 2011 .

Revenue model

About 88% of total revenues for the fiscal year 2009 came from marketing services. The largest segment of it comes from search advertising, where advertisers bid for search terms to display their ads on the search results, on average Yahoo! makes 2.5 cents to 3 cents from each search. With the search advertising system "Panama" Yahoo! aims to increase revenue generated from search.

Other forms of advertising which bring in revenue for Yahoo! include display and contextual advertising.

Growth of Yahoo

In January 1994, Jerry Yang and David Filo were electrical engineering graduate students at Stanford University. when they created a website named "David and Jerry's Guide to the World Wide Web". David and Jerry's Guide to the World Wide Web was a directory of other websites, organized in a hierarchy, as opposed to a searchable index of pages. In April 1994, "David and Jerry's Guide to the World Wide Web" was renamed "Yahoo!". The yahoo.com domain was created on January 18, 1995. The word stems from the name of a fictional begin from Gulliver`s travels ; it was also a slang term used by college students in David Filo's native Louisiana in the late 1980s and early 1990s to refer to an unsophisticated, rural Southerner; Filo's college girlfriend often referred to Filo as a "yahoo."

Yahoo! grew rapidly throughout the 1990s. Like many search engins and web director , Yahoo! diversified into a web portal. It also made many high-profile acquisitions. Its stock price skyrocketed during the dot-com bubble , Yahoo! stocks closing at an all-time high of $118.75 a share on 3 January 2000. However, after the dot-com bubble burst it settled at a post-bubble low of $4.05 on 26 September 2001.

In 2000, Yahoo! began using Google for search results. Over the next four years, it developed its own search technologies, which it began using in 2004. Yahoo! also revamped its mail service to compete with Google's Gmail in 2007. The company struggled through 2008, with several large layoffs.

In February 2008, Micrisoft Corporation made an unsolicited bid to acquire Yahoo! for USD $44.6 billion. Yahoo! subsequently formally rejected the bid, claiming that it "substantially undervalues" Yahoo! and was not in the interest of its shareholders. Three years later, Yahoo! had a stock market capitalization of USD $22.24 billion. Carol Bartz replaced cofounder Jerry Yang in January 2009.

Etablishment of Yahoo

Yahoo! began as a student hobby and evolved into a global brand that has changed the way people communicate with each other, find and access information and purchase things. The two founders of Yahoo!, David Filo and Jerry Yang, Ph.D. candidates in Electrical Engineering at Stanford University, started their guide in a campus trailer in February 1994 as a way to keep track of their personal interests on the Internet. Before long they were spending more time on their home-brewed lists of favorite links than on their doctoral dissertations. Eventually, Jerry and David's lists became too long and unwieldy, and they broke them out into categories. When the categories became too full, they developed subcategories ... and the core concept behind Yahoo! was born.

The Web site started out as "Jerry and David'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: "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.

Jerry and David soon found they were not alone in wanting a single place to find useful Web sites. Before long, hundreds of people were accessing their guide from well beyond the Stanford trailer. Word spread from friends to what quickly became a significant, loyal audience throughout the closely-knit Internet community. Yahoo! celebrated its first million-hit day in the fall of 1994, translating to almost 100 thousand unique visitors.

Due to the torrent of traffic and enthusiastic reception Yahoo! was receiving, the founders knew they had a potential business on their hands. In March 1995, the pair incorporated the business and met with dozens of Silicon Valley venture capitalists. They eventually came across Sequoia Capital, the well-regarded firm whose most successful investments included Apple Computer, Atari, Oracle and Cisco Systems. They agreed to fund Yahoo! in April 1995 with an initial investment of nearly $2 million.

Realizing their new company had the potential to grow quickly, Jerry and David began to shop for a management team. They hired Tim Koogle, a veteran of Motorola and an alumnus of the Stanford engineering department, as chief executive officer and Jeffrey Mallett, founder of Novell's WordPerfect consumer division, as chief operating officer. They secured a second round of funding in Fall 1995 from investors Reuters Ltd. and Softbank. Yahoo! launched a highly-successful IPO in April 1996 with a total of 49 employees.

Today, Yahoo! Inc. is a leading global Internet communications, commerce and media company that offers a comprehensive branded network of services to more than 345 million individuals each month worldwide. As the first online navigational guide to the Web, www.yahoo.com is the leading guide in terms of traffic, advertising, household and business user reach. Yahoo! is the No. 1 Internet brand globally and reaches the largest audience worldwide. The company also provides online business and enterprise services designed to enhance the productivity and Web presence of Yahoo!'s clients. These services include Corporate Yahoo!, a popular customized enterprise portal solution; audio and video streaming; store hosting and management; and Web site tools and services. The company's global Web network includes 25 World properties. Headquartered in Sunnyvale, Calif., Yahoo! has offices in Europe, Asia, Latin America, Australia, Canada and the United States.