Yahoo!

Yahoo! Inc.
Website	www.yahoo.com
Company form	Corporation
Ownership type	Public, NasdaqGS - YHOO
Founded	1994, by Jerry Yang and David Filo
Headquarters	701 First Avenue Sunnyvale , CA 94089 United States
Industry	Technology
Product/Service	web portal & Internet Services

Yahoo! (Nasdaq: YHOO) is a top US web portal, one of the most visited websites in the world, according to Compete, Alexa, and others.

History

Yahoo! was started in 1994 as "Jerry's Guide to the World Wide Web" by Jerry Yang and David Filo, both Stanford University students. The name was later changed to Yahoo, which, although supposedly an acronym for "Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle," is said to have been chosen for its dictionary definition, rude, unsophisticated, uncouth.

Yahoo! expands

Not long after the website started, it began to rapidly expand; and not just only around the Stanford University campus. Yahoo! successfully celebrated its first 1-million hit day in Fall, 1994. In March of 1995, Yahoo! Inc was incorporated.

The reason behind the exclamation point

Yahoo! is generally referred to as 'Yahoo', which is incorrect. The ultimate reason for the exclamation point is that while incorporating the name, Yahoo, specifically without the exclamation point, was already registered, forcing Yang and Filo to add it. [1]

Successful IPO

With a mere 49 employees, Yahoo! successfully made its Initial Public Offering (IPO) on the NASDAQ under the symbol YHOO in April of 2004.

Television ads

Several years ago, during the dot-com bubble, Yahoo! actively advertised on television, with a very distinct jingle, which sounds like someone yodeling the term 'Yahoooooooo.'

More recently, after it redesigned the Yahoo! portal, Yahoo! began to lightly advertise on television again.

The newer Yahoo! commercials can be found at [2].

Controversies

Yahoo! Suggestion Boards and Digg

On February 14, 2007, Yahoo! implemented "Suggestion Boards" for a dozen of their sections; replicating Digg's style of democratic voting and using a somewhat-similar color scheme. [3]

Because of this, parts of the online community were outraged. [4] Yahoo!'s Yodel Anecdotal blog, Yahoo!'s official blog, was stormed with negative comments from users of both Yahoo! and Digg.

Yahoo! today

Today, Yahoo! is a leading global Internet brand with dozens of services.

Its main product, the Yahoo! portal has dozens of sections (including Finance, Music, Real Estate, Shopping, Travel, and others) which are mostly provided free. Many of these services, however, require that you sign up for a free Yahoo! ID.

Yahoo! is also known very well for its Yahoo! Mail and the Yahoo! Instant Messenger, both of which are leaders in their respective industries.

Along with the Yahoo.com portal, Yahoo! has purchased several other web properties, including

• Flickr, a photo sharing website
• Jumpcut, an in-browser video editor
• Blo.gs, a service based on RSS feed aggregation
• AltaVista, formerly one of the top search engines; famous for its BabelFish web translation services
• del.icio.us (pronounced delicious), an online social bookmarking service

On February 13, 2007, Yahoo! implemented an online version of its instant messenger service into Yahoo! Mail. This is very similar to how Google integrated Gmail (its email service) and Google Talk (its instant-messenger service) about one year earlier.