ooBdoo Information

 

 

Yahoo!

:From ooBdoo The Free Information Database

 

Yahoo! Inc.
 
Type Public (NASDAQ: YHOO)
Founded Santa Clara, California, USA (March 2, 1995)
Headquarters United States Sunnyvale, California, USA
Key people Terry Semel, Chairman & CEO
Jerry Yang, Chief Yahoo
David Filo, Chief Yahoo
Dan Rosensweig, COO
Susan Decker, CFO & EVP
Industry Internet services
Products (See complete products listing.)
Revenue $5.257 Billion USD (2005)
Net income $1.896 Billion USD (2005)
Employees 11,000 (2006)
Website www.yahoo.com

Yahoo! Inc. (NASDAQ: YHOO) is an internet services company. It is an American 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 on January of 1994 and incorporated on March 2, 1995. The company is headquartered in Sunnyvale, California.

According to Web trends companies Alexa Internet and Netcraft, Yahoo! is the most visited website on the Internet today 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.

Contents

History

Yahoo! started out as "Jerry's Guide to the World Wide Web", a web site featuring a directory of other sites, organized in a hierarchy (rather than a searchable index of pages). It was renamed "Yahoo!" shortly thereafter. "Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle" is a backronym for this name, but Filo and Yang insist they selected the name because they liked the word's general definition, as in Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift: "rude, unsophisticated, uncouth."[1] As the backronymed version of the name implies, it was not the first directory of its kind, but it was the first to become widely popular as "the" directory of the fledgling Web. Yahoo! itself first resided on Yang's student workstation, "Akebono", while the software was lodged on Filo's computer, "Konishiki", both named after famous sumo wrestlers. The "yet another" phrasing goes back at least to the Unix utility yacc, whose name is an acronym for "yet another compiler compiler".

Yahoo! had its initial public offering on April 12, 1996, raising $33.8 million, by selling 2.6 million shares at US$13 each.

As Yahoo!'s popularity has increased, so has the range of features it offers, making it a kind of one-stop shop for all the popular activities of the Internet. These now include: Yahoo! Mail, a Web-based e-mail service, Yahoo! Messenger, an instant messaging client, a very popular mailing list service (Yahoo! Groups), online gaming and chat, various news and information portals, online shopping and online auction facilities. Many of these are based at least in part on previously independent services, which Yahoo! has acquired - such as the popular GeoCities free Web-hosting service, Rocketmail, and various competing mailing list providers such as eGroups. Many of these take-overs were controversial and unpopular with users of the existing services, as Yahoo! often changed the relevant terms of service. An example of this is their claiming intellectual property rights for the content on their servers, which the original companies had not done.

At the pinnacle of the Internet boom in the year 2000, the cable news station CNBC reported that Yahoo! and eBay were discussing a 50/50 merger.[2], Although the merger never materialised the two companies decided to form a marketing/advertising alliance six years later in 2006. [3]

Yahoo! has partnerships with telecommunications and Internet providers - such as BT in the UK, Rogers in Canada, and AT&T, Verizon[4] and BellSouth in the US - to create content-rich broadband services to rival those offered by AOL. The company offers a branded credit card, Yahoo! Visa, through a partnership with Chase.

Beginning in late 2002, Yahoo! began to bolster its search services by acquiring relevant companies. In December 2002, Yahoo! acquired Inktomi, and in July 2003, it acquired Overture Services, Inc. and its subsidiaries AltaVista and AlltheWeb.

As of 2005 Yahoo!'s news message boards have gained something of a cult following. Attached to every story is a discussion board, yet rarely are the posts pertinent to the story. Often, the posts are deliberately outrageous, attempting to provoke angry responses which, in turn, lead to more offensive posts and so on.

In June 2005 Yahoo! acquired blo.gs, a service based on RSS feed aggregation, primarily from weblogs (hence the name), which produces a simple list (and also an RSS feed thereof) of freshly updated Weblogs, ordered according to recentness of update. blo.gs was the first Internet company hosted on a domain hack Yahoo! acquired, del.icio.us being the second.

Important events

Please note that this list is merely partial.

  • January 1994: Jerry Yang and David Filo create "Jerry's Guide to the World Wide Web" while studying at Stanford University.
  • April 1994: "Jerry's Guide to the World Wide Web" is re-named "Yahoo!"
  • March 1995: Yahoo! is incorporated.
  • 1995: Ziff Davis Inc. launches the magazine Yahoo! Internet Life, initially as ZD Internet Life. The magazine was meant to accompany and complement the web site.
  • April 12, 1996: Yahoo! has Initial public offering, closing at $33.00, up 270% from the IPO price, after peaking at $43.00 for the day.
  • June 8, 1998: Yahoo! acquires Viaweb, co-founded by Paul Graham, which becomes Yahoo! Stores.
  • October 12, 1998: Yahoo! acquires direct marketing company Yoyodyne Entertainment, Inc. [13]
  • January 28, 1999: Yahoo! acquires Geocities.
  • April 1, 1999: Yahoo! acquires Broadcast.com.
  • January 3, 2000: Yahoo! stocks close at an all-time high of $475.00 (pre-split price) a share. The day before, it hit an intra-day high of $500.13 (pre-split price).
  • January 19, 2000: At the height of the Dot-com tech bubble, 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). [14]
  • February 7, 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). [15] [16]. 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.
  • June 28, 2000: Yahoo! acquires eGroups.
  • March 7, 2001: Yahoo! CEO Tim Koogle announces he will step down and remain only a company board member.
  • April 17, 2001: Terry Semel announced as the new Yahoo! CEO.
  • September 26, 2001 Yahoo! stocks close at an all-time low of $8.11. The day before, it hit an intra-day low of $8.02 (both figures are pre-split prices).
  • December 27, 2001: Yahoo! acquires HotJobs.
  • June 3, 2002: SBC and Yahoo! Launch National Co-Branded Dial Service -- Press Release
  • December 2002: Yahoo! Inc. starts acquisition of Inktomi Web search engine
  • July, 2003: BT Openworld announces an alliance with Yahoo! -- Press Release
  • July 2003, Yahoo! acquires Overture Services, Inc.
  • January 19, 2004: Yahoo! Inc. announces the formation of Yahoo! Research Labs, a research organization focusing on the invention of new technologies and solutions for Yahoo!. Yahoo!'s Head and Principal Scientist, Dr. Gary William Flake, leads the new organization. Dr. Flake has since left the company and now works at Microsoft.
  • February 19, 2004: Yahoo! drops Google-powered results, launching its own web-crawling algorithm and using its own site index after it had used Google's results for a long time.
  • March 2004: Yahoo! launches its own search engine technology.
  • March 1, 2004: Yahoo! announces (as cited in the New York Times article listed in the "References" section) that it will practice paid inclusion for its search service. However, it also announced it would continue to rely mainly on a free web crawl for most of its search engine content.
  • March 25, 2004: Yahoo! acquires the European shopping search engine Kelkoo.
  • July 9, 2004 Yahoo! acquires email provider Oddpost.com [17].
  • December 15, 2004: Yahoo! launches beta version of its video search engine.
  • February 9, 2005 Yahoo! Launch is changed to Yahoo! Music, which still provides free music.
  • February 15, 2005 Yahoo! establishes its European Headquarters in Dublin, Ireland with the creation of 400 new jobs. [18]
  • February 28, 2005 Yahoo! launches a developer network giving an API to most of its search verticals.
  • March 2, 2005 Yahoo! completes 10 years of corporate existence. To celebrate this, it gives free ice cream coupons at Baskin Robbins to its users.
  • March 20, 2005 Yahoo! acquires photo sharing service Flickr [19]
  • March 29, 2005 Yahoo! launch blogging and social networking service Yahoo! 360°
  • April 7, 2005 Wikimedia Foundation announces Yahoo! support [20]
  • May 26, 2005 Yahoo! announces its new PhotoMail service
  • June 14, 2005 Yahoo! acquires VoIP provider DialPad Communications.
  • July 15, 2005 Yahoo! announces Yahoo! Research Berkeley
  • July 25, 2005 Yahoo! acquires widget engine Konfabulator
  • August 11, 2005 Yahoo! acquires 40% of Alibaba.com for $1 billion US, and Alibaba will take over operation of Yahoo! China. [21]
  • August 23, 2005: Verizon and Yahoo! Launch Integrated DSL Service -- Press Release
  • September 7, 2005. Yahoo! supplies information to People's Republic of China which then jails reporter Shi Tao, age 37, for 10 years. Yahoo! states that they were following Chinese law. [22]
  • October 4, 2005 Yahoo! purchases online social event calendar Upcoming.org. [23]
  • October 17, 2005 Yahoo! buys British company Whereonearth Ltd which provides location technology.
  • November 15, 2005 The sports section of My Yahoo! is hacked; titles such as "selfhood + conscience" and "aesthetic freedom" link to various pages at doublereflection.org.
  • December 1, 2005 - Tivo and Yahoo! form a partnership where several Yahoo! features can be viewed on television via the Series2 TiVO set top box. [24], [25]
  • December 8/ (US time) 9, (Australian time) 2005 Yahoo! 7 announced for January 2006. Official Site
  • December 9, 2005 Yahoo! acquires del.icio.us.
  • January 9, 2006 Yahoo! acquires webjay
  • February 12, 2006 Yahoo! Developer Network PHP Center launched.
  • May 1, 2006 Yahoo! launches Yahoo! Tech.
  • August 31, 2006 Yahoo! retires former frontpage.
  • September 29 to September 30, 2006 Yahoo! hosts an Open Hack Day(external site), featuring a musical performance by Beck

Yahoo! Research Labs

Yahoo! Research has seven research labs:

  • Yahoo! Research Berkeley, California in association with the School of Information at the University of California, Berkeley.
  • Burbank, California (moved from Pasadena, California in November 2005).
  • Sunnyvale, California.
  • New York, USA.
  • Barcelona, Spain.
  • Santiago, Chile.
  • Grenoble, France ex-Kelkoo R&D center.

Yahoo! Next

Yahoo! Next is essentially incubation ground for future Yahoo! technologies in their beta testing phase, a chance for the Yahoo! community to interact and have a say on how upcoming products are designed and fine-tuned. Each prototype can be discussed in its own individual Yahoo! Next forum.

See also


External links

Yahoo!-owned sites and services

This is a partial, alphabetized list. For a complete listing of the services see List of Yahoo! services.

Information about Yahoo!

 


Original article / information obtained (seeded) from Wikipedia [7]