Yahoo Facts
Yahoo is an American computer services company with a mission to “be the most essential global Internet service for consumers and businesses”. It operates an Internet portal, a web directory and a host of other services including the popular Yahoo! Mail.
It was founded by Stanford graduate students David Filo and Jerry Yang in January 1994 and incorporated on March 2, 1995. The company is headquartered in Sunnyvale, California.
According to Alexa Internet and Netcraft, both of which are Web trends companies, Yahoo! is the most visited website on the Internet today. The global network of Yahoo websites received 3 billion page views per day as of October 2004.
Yahoo History
Yahoo! started out as “Jerry’s Guide to the World Wide Web” but eventually received a new moniker with the help of a dictionary. The name Yahoo is an acronym for “Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle,” but Filo and Yang insist they selected the name because they liked the general definition of a yahoo, as in Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift: “rude, unsophisticated, uncouth.”
Yahoo itself first resided on Yang’s student workstation, “Akebono,” while the software was lodged on Filo’s computer, “Konishiki” both named after legendary 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, selling 2.6 million shares at $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, an instant messaging client, a very popular mailing list service (Yahoo! Groups), online gaming and chat, various news and information portals, online shopping and 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 would be their claiming intellectual property rights for the content on their servers, which the original companies had not done.
Yahoo Milestones
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.
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).
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).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 what happened to eBay earlier.
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, 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 dropped Google-powered results, returning to its own results after 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.
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.
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. Gives out free ice cream coupons at Baskin Robbins to its users to celebrate its “birthday.”
March 20, 2005 Yahoo! acquires photo sharing service Flickr
April 7, 2005 Wikimedia Foundation announces Yahoo! support
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 Lab – Berkeley (YRLB)
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.
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.
October 4, 2005 Yahoo! purchases online social event calender Upcoming.org.
October 17, 2005 Yahoo! buys British company Whereonearth Ltd which provides location technology.
