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Yahoo! is an Internet portal that incorporates a search engine and a directory of World Wide Web sites organized in a hierarchy of topic categories. As a directory, it provides both new and seasoned Web users the reassurance of a structured view of hundreds of thousands of Web sites and millions of Web pages. It also provides one of the best ways to search the Web for a given topic. Since Yahoo is associated with the most popular Web search sites, if a search argument doesn't lead to a Yahoo topic page, it will still lead to results from the six or seven popular search engine sites Yahoo links to.

Yahoo began as the bookmark lists of two Stanford University graduate students, David Filo and Jerry Yang. After putting their combined bookmark lists organized by categories on a college site, the list began to grow into an Internet phenomenon. It became the first such directory with a large following. Filo and Yang postponed their graduate work and became part of a public offering for a mutilation dollar corporation. As of October, 2005, Yahoo was serving approximately 3.4 billion page views worldwide.

Origin of yahoo

Jerry Yang and David Filo, Ph.D. candidates in Electrical Engineering at Stanford University created a web site called “Jerry’s Guide to the World Wide Web”. Jerry’s Guide to the World Wide Web was a directory of web sites organized in a hierarchy rather than being organized in a searchable index of pages. In April of 1994, “Jerry’s Guide to the World Wide Web” was renamed “Yahoo!”. The name Yahoo! is usually taken to be as an acronym for “Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle” but Filo and Young insisted that they chose the name Yahoo! as they liked the general definition of Yahoo!: “rude, unsophisticated, uncouth”. Initially Yahoo! resided on Yang’s workstation “Akenbono” while the software was stored on Filo’s computer “Konishiki”; both computers were named after famous sumo wrestlers. The first URL for Yahoo! was http://akenbono.stanford.edu/yahoo .

Yahoo Messenger LogoSoon the word spread about Yahoo! and hundreds of people were accessing Yahoo! and were becoming regular users of the service. By fall of 1994, Yahoo! received more than a million hit and had close to 100 thousand unique visitors. After observing the success of Yahoo!, Yang and Filo knew that the website had a big business potential. On 2nd March, 1995 Yahoo! was incorporated. Yahoo was already used by other companies as their trademark, so in order to get the trademark the exclamation mark was added to Yahoo. The founders met with many Silicon Valley venture capitalists to get some funding to start their own company. Sequoia Capital, the firm which had invested in Apple, Atari, Oracle and Cisco agreed to fund Yahoo! with an initial investment of around $2 million. Jerry and David hired Tim Koogle, an alumnus of Stanford and working in Motorola, as Chief Executive officer of Yahoo! and Jeffrey Mallett of Novell as Chief Operating Officer. After receiving another funding in 1995 from Softbank and Reuters Ltd., Yahoo! came out with its initial public offering (IPO) on 12th April, 1996. At tat time Yahoo! had only 49 employees. Yahoo! raised $33.8 million from the IPO by selling 2.6 million shares at $13 each.

Yahoo! started diversifying into Web portal just like other search engines and web directories were doing. The Web portal providers were acquiring companies to increase the number of services being offered by them. This was being done so that the user spends maximum time possible on the portal. Yahoo! acquired “Four11” in 1997 and the mail service being provided by Four11, Rocketmail, became now famous Yahoo! Mail. Yahoo! Games was a result of acquisition of “ClassicGames.com”. In 1998 Yahoo! acquired Yoyodyne Entertainment Inc., a direct marketing company and acquired “GeoCities” which is a web hosting provider. “eGroups” became Yahoo! Groups after being acquired by Yahoo! in 2000. Yahoo! messenger was launched by Yahoo! on 21st July, 1999. Most of the acquisitions by Yahoo! were controversial and didn’t go down well with the users of the existing service as Yahoo! often changed the terms of service. Success of Yahoo! was evident when in early 2000 Yahoo! stocks climbed an all time high of $475 per share. In February 2000 Yahoo.com temporarily stopped working for a few hours and the failure was attributed to an attack by hackers rather than blaming an internal problem. In an agreement signed on 26th June, 2000 between Yahoo! and Google the searches made on yahoo.com were powered by Google.

Yahoo! was one of the few large Internet companies that survived the dot-com bubble burst. Still it had effect on the stock of the company which fell to an all time low of $8.11 on September 26, 2001. To enhance the search services being provided by it, Yahoo! started acquiring other search engines. It acquired “Inktomi” in December 2002, “Overture Services Inc” and its subsidiaries “AltaVista” and “AlltheWeb” in July 2003. In February 2004 Yahoo! decided not to use searches powered by Google and decided to use its own technology to provide search results. Google forced Yahoo! on back foot after it released Gmail, its own web mail service which offered 1 GB storage space, on 1st April 2004. Yahoo! in a desperate bid to retain users upgraded the storage space of all Yahoo! mail accounts from 4 MB to 100 MB and of all Yahoo! Mail Plus accounts to 2 GB. Yahoo! acquired “Oddpost”, an email provider, to add an Ajax interface to Yahoo! mail Beta. After Google again gave Yahoo! a run for its money by launching Google Talk, an instant messaging and Voice over IP service on 24th August 2005, Yahoo! announced that Yahoo! messenger and MSN messenger would become interoperable.

In an effort to expand the services provided by it, Yahoo! kept on acquiring companies with a clear emphasis on Web 2.0 based services. In February 2005, Yahoo! Launch became Yahoo! Music. Yahoo! purchased the photo sharing service “Flickr” on 20th March, 2005. The company forayed into blogging business by launching Yahoo! 360°, a blogging and social networking service, on March 29th 2005. Yahoo! acquired “blo.gs”, a RSS feed based service. “Upcoming.org”, a social event calendar site was bought by Yahoo! on 4th October, 2005. Yahoo! took acquisition of “del.icio.us”, a social bookmark site on 9th December and acquired playlist sharing community “webjay” in 2006 January.

Yahoo! Next contains forums where users can give feedback on the next generation Yahoo! technologies being developed. Currently, Yahoo! mail is the largest e mail service in the world and Yahoo! Search is the second largest search engine on the internet. Yahoo! Mobile provides Yahoo! services such as email, instant messaging, and search on the mobile phones. CNBC had reported during the dot-com boom that Yahoo! and eBay were thinking about 50:50 merger between the two companies. Though the said merger never took place, both companies decided to form a marketing and advertising partnership in 2006.

On March 20, 2007, Yahoo! introduced a new Internet search system called oneSearch specifically developed for mobile phones. Yahoo! stated that using this too users can get relevant data such as for a particular movie you will get the list of theatres screening that particular movie along with the ratings. To use oneSearch, a zip code or a city name is required for local search results. The results are listed on a single page and listed in categories. Yahoo provides users with listings that come from a variety of data sources. Yahoo's search results page is dominated by editorial listings that come from Google. However, paid placement ads from Overture are offered and options to see Yahoo's own human-powered results are also present. In addition, Yahoo may direct users to its own portal content, such as the Yahoo Full Coverage or Yahoo Shopping areas.

yahoo overview

The pages listed below will explain how to appear in the major data sources that Yahoo uses for its search results. If you are new to Yahoo, it's highly recommended to read all the pages in the Essential Reading section. The pages listed under Other Information provide additional help

Unless noted, these pages cover the main Yahoo.com site, which is primarily aimed at those searching for sites in the United States or for English-language sites that appeal to a worldwide audience. Some limited information about non-US editions of Yahoo does appear on the Yahoo Country Sites page.

Finally, if you are reading these pages before Oct. 14, 2002, you may notice some small typos on them. Given Yahoo's recent changes, I wanted to integrate all the new information and post them as quickly as possible. I expect to finish fully proofing the pages by Oct 14

how yahoo helps

Yahoo! Web Search is an open search platform that lets 3rd parties build and present search results by allowing the content to be integrated into applications. To do this, a person needs to get an Application ID to access Yahoo!'s services so that the system can identify the person's applications. Yahoo! says that this system works much like a browser's user-agent string.