Yahoo! Inc. (NASDAQ: YHOO) is an American public corporation and global Internet services company. It provides a range of products and services including a web portal, a search engine, the Yahoo! Directory, Yahoo! Mail, news, and posting. It was founded by Stanford University 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 traffic analysis companies (including Comscore, Alexa Internet and Netcraft), Yahoo! has been one of the most visited Web sites on the Internet, with more than 412 million unique users.[citation needed] 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. Web sites
History and growth
Early history (1994-1996)
In January 1994, Stanford graduate students Jerry Yang 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”. Its URL was akebono.stanford.edu/yahoo.
By the end of 1994, Yahoo had already received one million hits. Yang and Filo realized their website had massive business potential, and on 1 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 omitted when referring to Yahoo.
Growth (1997-1999)
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 (2000-2001)
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 retained Google as the default world-wide-web search engine for yahoo.com following a beta trial in 1999.
Post dot-com bubble (2002-2006)
Yahoo was one of the few surviving large Internet 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. In February 2003, Yahoo acquired Konfabulator and rebranded it Yahoo! Widgets, a desktop application 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. In 2007, Yahoo took out the storage meters and made the storage limit unlimited. 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 (2007- )
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.