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"Yahoo" redirects here. For other uses, see Yahoo (disambiguation).
Yahoo Inc.
Company typePublic (Nasdaq: YHOO)
IndustryInternet services
FoundedUnited States Santa Clara, California
(March 2, 1995)
Headquarters
Sunnyvale, California
,
USA
Key people
Terry Semel, chairman
Jerry Yang, CEO, co-founder
David Filo, co-founder
Susan Decker, President
Products(See services listing.)
RevenueIncrease$6.43 Billion USD (2006)
Increase$1.896 Billion USD (2005)
Number of employees
11,000 (2006)
Websiteyahoo.com

Yahoo! Inc. (Nasdaq: YHOO) 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 traffic analysis companies (including 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 and growth

Yahoo! co-founders Jerry Yang (left) and David Filo (right)
File:YahooBeta20070426.png
Screenshot of the Yahoo! main page on April 26, 2007
Yahoo headquarters in Sunnyvale

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".[1] Its URL was akebono.stanford.edu/yahoo.[2]

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.[3] 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.[4] 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.[5] 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).[6]

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).[7][8] 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.[9] Although the merger never materialized the two companies decided to form a marketing/advertising alliance six years later in 2006.[10]

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.[11]

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.[12] In July 2003, BT Openworld announced an alliance with Yahoo[13] On 23 August 2005, Yahoo and Verizon launched an integrated DSL service.[14]

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.[15] On 29 March 2005, the company launched its blogging and social networking service Yahoo! 360°.[16] 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.

Products and services

Main article: List of Yahoo!-owned sites and services

Yahoo provides a wide array of internet services that cater to most online activities. It operates the web portal http://www.yahoo.com 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.

Yahoo! Search is the second largest search engine on the internet, 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 with almost half the market share.[17] In March, 2007, Yahoo announced that their e-mail service will offer unlimited storage beginning May 2007, and they have started offering the unlimited storages, but this will take few months to cover all subscribers to allow smooth transition. .[18]

Yahoo also offers social networking services and user-generated content in products such as My Web, Yahoo! Personals, Yahoo! 360°, Yahoo Photos, and Flickr.

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 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

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.

OneSearch

Yahoo 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 search 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 trying to make.[19]

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 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.

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.[20]

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 [21]

Revenue model

Yahoo's revenue comes from online advertising. 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 new search advertising system "Panama" Yahoo aims to increase revenue generated from search.[22]

Other forms of advertising which bring in revenue for Yahoo include display and contextual advertising.[citation needed]

Important events

File:Y! Bang logo.svg
Yahoo logo with new color scheme

Criticism and controversy

Yahoo paid inclusion controversy

In March 2004, Yahoo launched a paid inclusion program whereby commercial websites are guaranteed listings on the Yahoo search engine after payment. This scheme is lucrative, but has proved unpopular both with website marketers (who are reluctant to pay), and the public (who are unhappy about the paid-for listings being indistinguishable from other search results). As of Oct 2006, Paid Inclusion doesn't guarantee any commercial listing, it only helps the paid inclusion customers, by crawling their site more often and by providing some statistics on the searches that led to the page and some additional smart links (provided by customers as feeds) below the actual url.

Yahoo has also been criticized for funding spyware and adware — advertising from Yahoo's clients often appears on-screen in pop-ups generated from adware that a user may have installed on their computer without realizing it by accepting online offers to download software to fix computer clocks or improve computer security, add browser enhancements, etc. Similarly, Yahoo has received adverse comment for bundling their Yahoo toolbar with other software (Macromedia Flash 8 is an example) with installation being the default setting. The toolbar itself has been noted as taking up a lot of screen-space when installed. Also, Windows users will find themselves unable to uninstall the toolbar by normal means on Internet Explorer.

Work in China

Yahoo, along with Google China, Microsoft, Cisco, AOL, Skype, Nortel and others, has cooperated with the Chinese government in implementing a system of internet censorship in mainland China.

Unlike Google or Microsoft, which keep confidential records of its users outside China, Yahoo! stated that the company will not protect the privacy and confidentiality of its Chinese customers from the authorities.[39]

Human rights advocates such as Human Rights Watch and media groups such as Reporters Without Borders state that it is wrong for companies to profit from censorship and restrictions on freedom of the press and freedom of speech and that if companies would stop contributing to the authorities' censorship efforts, the government could be forced to change[citation needed].

Chinese dissident imprisonment controversy

In April 2005, Shi Tao, a journalist working for a Chinese newspaper, was sentenced to 10 years in prison by the Changsha Intermediate People's Court of Hunan Province, China (First trial case no 29), for "providing state secrets to foreign entities". The "secret", as Shi Tao's family claimed, refers to a brief list of censorship orders he sent from a Yahoo Mail account to the Asia Democracy Forum before the anniversary of the Tiananmen Square Incident.[40]

The verdict stated Yahoo Holdings (Hong Kong) confirmed that an IP address, registered by a Hunan newspaper that Shi Tao worked for, accessed the mail account at a particular time. He had sent the message through an anonymous Yahoo account, but police had gone straight to his offices and picked him up. Reporters Without Borders (RSF) is concerned with the ease with which Mr. Shi had been caught. In April 2006, Yahoo Holdings (Hong Kong) is under investigation by Hong Kong's Privacy Commissioner for Personal Data.

Criticism of Yahoo intensified when the court document stated the company aided Chinese authorities in the case of dissident Li Zhi. In December 2003 Li Zhi was sentenced to 8 years imprisonment for "inciting subversion".

In recent months, Yahoo has also followed the directive of United States government officials in turning over information which the United States deems as key for continuing its global war on terror. Yahoo contends it must respect the laws of governments in jurisdictions where it is operating.

On 2 June 2006, the union representing journalists in the UK and Ireland (NUJ) called on its 40,000 members to boycott all Yahoo Inc. products and services to protest the Internet company's reported actions in China.[41]

Sued in US court for outing Chinese dissident

Main article: Wang Xiaoning

Wang Xiaoning is a Chinese dissident from Shenyang who was arrested by authorities of the People's Republic of China for publishing controversial material online.

In 2000 and 2001, Wang, who was an engineer by profession, posted electronic journals in a Yahoo group calling for democratic reform and an end to single-party rule. He was arrested in September 2002 after Yahoo assisted Chinese authorities by providing information. In September 2003, Wang was convicted of charges of "incitement to subvert state power" and sentenced to ten years in prison.[42]

On April 18, 2007, Xiaoning's wife Yu Ling sued Yahoo under human rights laws in federal court in San Francisco, California, United States.[43] Wang Xiaoning is named as a plaintiff in the Yahoo suit, which was filed with help from the World Organization for Human Rights USA. "Yahoo is guilty of 'an act of corporate irresponsibility,' said Morton Sklar, executive director of the group. 'Yahoo had reason to know that if they provided China with identification information that those individuals would be arrested."[44]

Yahoo's decision to assist China's authoritarian government came as part of a policy of reconciling its services with the Chinese governement's policies. This came after China blocked Yahoo services for a time. As reported in The Washington Post and many media sources:

The suit says that in 2001, Wang was using a Yahoo e-mail account to post anonymous writings to an Internet mailing list. The suit alleges that Yahoo, under pressure from the Chinese government, blocked that account. Wang set up a new account via Yahoo and began sending material again; the suit alleges that Yahoo gave the government information that allowed it to identify and arrest Wang in September 2002. The suit says prosecutors in the Chinese courts cited Yahoo's cooperation.[45]

Human rights organizations groups are basing their case on a 217-year-old U.S. law to punish corporations for human rights violations abroad, an effort the Bush administration has opposed:

In recent years, activists working with overseas plaintiffs have sued roughly two dozen businesses under the Alien Tort Claims Act, which the activists say grants jurisdiction to American courts over acts abroad that violate international norms. Written by the Founding Fathers in 1789 for a different purpose, the law was rarely invoked until the 1980s.[46]

Chatrooms and message boards

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.[47] Yahoo News' message board section was closed on December 19, 2006[48] due to the trolling phenomenon.

On May 25 2006, Yahoo's image search was criticized for bringing up sexually explicit images even when SafeSearch was on. This was discovered by a teacher who was intending to use the service with a class to search for "www". Yahoo's response to this was, "Yahoo is aware of this issue and is working to resolve it as quickly as possible".[49]

See also

Notes and references

  1. ^ http://docs.yahoo.com/info/misc/history.html
  2. ^ http://docs.yahoo.com/info/misc/history.html
  3. ^ Inventing Yahoo!
  4. ^ http://blog.cre8asite.net/bwelford/archives/date/2004/04/
  5. ^ http://www.wired.com/news/business/0,1367,15555,00.html
  6. ^ http://www.internetnews.com/ent-news/print.php/289851
  7. ^ http://www.dennismoran.org/media/stacks.msnbc.com/news/376219.html
  8. ^ http://news.com.com/2100-1023-236621.html?legacy=cnet
  9. ^ http://www.wired.com/news/business/0,1367,34967,00.html
  10. ^ http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20060525/ap_on_hi_te/yahoo_ebay
  11. ^ http://www.google.com/googlefriends/alert2_2000.html
  12. ^ Internet Leaders SBC and Yahoo! Launch National Co-Branded Dial Service
  13. ^ BT CONTINUES TO DELIVER ON BROADBAND TARGETS
  14. ^ http://newscenter.verizon.com/proactive/newsroom/release.vtml?id=92803
  15. ^ http://blog.flickr.com/flickrblog/2005/03/yahoo_actually_.html
  16. ^ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yahoo%21_360%C2%BA
  17. ^ Yahoo Tops Google In Mail, News, Finance
  18. ^ http://yodel.yahoo.com/2007/03/27/yahoo-mail-goes-to-infinity-and-beyond/
  19. ^ http://www.usb4ever.com/yahoo-gets-ahead-of-google-p.html
  20. ^ http://yhoo.client.shareholder.com/press/overview.cfm
  21. ^ http://searchengineland.com/070205-090623.php
  22. ^ A Long-Delayed Ad System Has Yahoo Crossing Its Fingers
  23. ^ http://www.wired.com/news/business/0,1367,15555,00.html Wired.com
  24. ^ http://www.internetnews.com/ent-news/print.php/289851 Internetnews
  25. ^ http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/635444.stm news.bbc.co.uk
  26. ^ http://news.com.com/2100-1023-236621.html?legacy=cnet news.bbc.com
  27. ^ http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/760782.stm News.bbc.co.uk Retrieved on 05-01-07
  28. ^ http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,36518,00.html Wired.com Retrieved on 05-01-07
  29. ^ http://oddpost.com/yahoo.html Oddpost.com Retrieved on 05-02-07
  30. ^ http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Yahoo_chooses_Dublin_as_location_of_new_European_Headquarters En.wikinews.org Retrieved on 05-03-07
  31. ^ http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Press_releases/Wikimedia_announces_Yahoo_support Wikimediafoundation.org Retrieved on 05-02-07
  32. ^ http://www.wired.com/news/business/0,1367,68497,00.html?tw=wn_tophead_5 Wired.com Retrieved on 05-02-07
  33. ^ Press Release http://newscenter.verizon.com/proactive/newsroom/release.vtml?id=92803 Press Release Newscenter.verizon.com
  34. ^ http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/asia-pacific/4221538.stm News.bbc.co.uk
  35. ^ http://www.waxy.org/archive/2005/10/04/yahoo_an.shtml Waxy.org Retrieved on 05-03-07
  36. ^ http://yodel.yahoo.com/2007/01/08/bloggers-unite-yahoo-joins-forces-with-mybloglog/
  37. ^ http://searchengineland.com/070205-090623.php
  38. ^ http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/n/a/2007/06/18/financial/f133429D12.DTL
  39. ^ Gunther, Marc. Tech execs get grilled over China business: Yahoo, Google, Microsoft and Cisco, facing attack in Congress, say they're doing more good than harm in China." CNN. February 16, 2006.
  40. ^ http://www.wmd.org/democracynews/may1102sup.html wmd.org
  41. ^ http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20060602/wr_nm/media_yahoo_nuj_dc_5 News.yahoo.com
  42. ^ "Chinese couple sue Yahoo in US over torture case". The Independent. 2007-04-20.
  43. ^ Egelko, Bob (2007-04-19). "Suit by wife of Chinese activist". SF Gate.
  44. ^ "Advocates Sue Yahoo In Chinese Torture Case". The Washington Post. 2007-04-20.
  45. ^ "Advocates Sue Yahoo In Chinese Torture Case". The Washington Post. 2007-04-20.
  46. ^ "Advocates Sue Yahoo In Chinese Torture Case". The Washington Post. 2007-04-20.
  47. ^ http://news.com.com/Yahoo+closes+chat+rooms+over+child+sex+concerns/2100-1025_3-5759705.html News.com
  48. ^ http://news.yahoo.com/page/messageboards News.yahoo.com
  49. ^ http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/05/25/yahoo_school_project/ Theregister.co.uk

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