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.