Yahoo! Inc. (NASDAQ: YHOO) is an American internet corporation founded in Santa Clara, California and headquartered in Sunnyvale, California, United States. The company is perhaps best known for its web portal, search engine (Yahoo! Search), Yahoo! Directory,Yahoo! Mail, Yahoo! News, advertising, online mapping (Yahoo! Maps), video sharing (Yahoo! Video), and social media websites and services. It is one of the largest websites in theUnited States.[2]
Yahoo! was founded by Jerry Yang and David Filo in January 1994 and was incorporated on March 1, 1995. On January 13, 2009, Yahoo! appointed Carol Bartz, former executive chairperson of Autodesk, as its new chief executive officer and a member of the board of directors.[3]
[edit]History and growth
Main article: History of Yahoo!
See also: Timeline 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".[4] 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!".[5][6] The yahoo.com domain was created on January 18, 1995.[7] The word stands from the name of a fictional being from Gulliver's Travels.
Yahoo! grew rapidly throughout the 1990s. Like many search engines and web directories, 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, Microsoft 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.[8] Carol Bartz replaced cofounder Jerry Yang in January 2009.[9]
[edit]Products and services
Main article: List of Yahoo!-owned sites and services
Yahoo! operates the web portal http://www.yahoo.com which provides content including the latest news, entertainment, and sports information. The portal also gives users access to other Yahoo! services like Yahoo! Mail, Yahoo! Maps, Yahoo! Finance, Yahoo! Groups andYahoo! Messenger.
[edit]Storing personal information and tracking usage
Working with comScore, The New York 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.[10]
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.[11] In contrast the Internal Revenue Services (IRS) database of all US taxpayers weighs in at only 150 TB.[11]
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.[12]
[edit]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.[13]
Yahoo! also offers social networking services and user-generated content in products such as My Web, Yahoo! Personals, Yahoo! 360°,Delicious, Flickr and Yahoo! Buzz. In December 2010, reports emerged that Yahoo! would be shutting down Yahoo! Buzz, MyBlogLog,Delicious and a handful of other products.[14]
Yahoo! Photos was shut down on September 20, 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.[15]
[edit]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.[16]
[edit]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.[specify][vague]
[edit]Mobile Services
Yahoo! Mobile offers services for on-e Turn It Around? |us email, instant messaging and mobile blogging; 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.[17]
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.[19]
[edit]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.[20]
[edit]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.
[edit]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 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.[21]
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.[22]
On April 7, 2008, Yahoo! announced APT from Yahoo!, which was originally called AMP! from Yahoo!,[23] an online advertising management platform.[24] The platform seeks to simplify advertising sales by unifying buyer and seller markets. The service was launched in September 2008.[25]
[edit]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.
[edit]Yahoo! BOSS
Yahoo! Search BOSS is a service that allows developers to build search applications based on Yahoo!'s search technology.[26] Early Partners in the program include Hakia, Me.dium, Delver, Daylife and Yebol.[27] 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.[28]
[edit]Yahoo! Meme
Yahoo! Meme is a beta social service, similar to the popular social networking sites Twitter and Jaiku.
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