Yahoo! - AbsoluteAstronomy.com

Yahoo! Inc. is an American multinational

Multinational corporation

A multi national corporation or enterprise , is a corporation or an enterprise that manages production or delivers services in more than one country. It can also be referred to as an international corporation...

internet corporation headquartered in Sunnyvale

Sunnyvale, California

Sunnyvale is a city in Santa Clara County, California, United States. It is one of the major cities that make up the Silicon Valley located in the San Francisco Bay Area...

, California, United States. The company is perhaps best known for its web portal

Web portal

A web portal or links page is a web site that functions as a point of access to information in the World Wide Web. A portal presents information from diverse sources in a unified way....

, search engine

Web search engine

A web search engine is designed to search for information on the World Wide Web and FTP servers. The search results are generally presented in a list of results often referred to as SERPS, or "search engine results pages". The information may consist of web pages, images, information and other...

(Yahoo! Search

Yahoo! Search

Yahoo! Search is a web search engine, owned by Yahoo! Inc. and was , the 2nd largest search engine on the web by query volume, at 6.42%, after its competitor Google at 85.35% and before Baidu at 3.67%, according to Net Applications....

), Yahoo! Directory

Yahoo! Directory

The Yahoo! Directory is a web directory that rivals the Open Directory Project in size. The directory was Yahoo!'s first offering. When Yahoo! changed to crawler-based listings for its main results in October 2002, the human-edited directory's significance dropped, but it was still being updated in...

, Yahoo! Mail

Yahoo! Mail

Yahoo! Mail is a web mail service provided by Yahoo!. It was inaugurated in 1997, and, according to comScore, Yahoo! Mail was the second largest web-based email service with 273.1 million users as of November 2010....

, Yahoo! News

Yahoo! News

Yahoo! News is an Internet-based news aggregator provided by Yahoo!. It features Top Stories, U.S. National, World, Business, Entertainment, Science, Health, Weather, Most Popular, News Photos, Op/Ed, and Local news....

, Yahoo! Groups, Yahoo! Answers

Yahoo! Answers

Yahoo! Answers is a community-driven question-and-answer site or a knowledge market launched by Yahoo! on June 28, 2005 that allows users to both submit questions to be answered and answer questions asked by other users...

, advertising

Advertising

Advertising is a form of communication used to persuade an audience to take some action with respect to products, ideas, or services. Most commonly, the desired result is to drive consumer behavior with respect to a commercial offering, although political and ideological advertising is also common...

, online mapping (Yahoo! Maps

Yahoo! Maps

Yahoo! Maps is a free online mapping portal provided by Yahoo!.-News:*On May 16, 2007, Yahoo! released a new map style designed by the cartography company...

), video sharing (Yahoo! Video

Yahoo! Video

Yahoo! Video is a video sharing website on which users could upload and share videos. The service is owned and created by Yahoo!. Yahoo! Video began as an internet-wide video search engine and added the ability to upload and share video clips in June 2006...

), and social media

Social media

The term Social Media refers to the use of web-based and mobile technologies to turn communication into an interactive dialogue. Andreas Kaplan and Michael Haenlein define social media as "a group of Internet-based applications that build on the ideological and technological foundations of Web 2.0,...

website

Website

A website, also written as Web site, web site, or simply site, is a collection of related web pages containing images, videos or other digital assets. A website is hosted on at least one web server, accessible via a network such as the Internet or a private local area network through an Internet...

s and services. It is one of the largest websites in the United States

United States

The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...

.

Yahoo! inclusive was founded by Jerry Yang and David Filo

David Filo

David Filo is an American businessman and the co-founder of Yahoo! with Jerry Yang.Until the company decided to switch to PHP, his Filo Server Program, written in the C programming language, was the server-side scripting software used to dynamically serve variable web pages, called Filo Server...

in January 1994 and was incorporated on March 1, 1995. On January 13, 2009, Yahoo! appointed Carol Bartz

Carol Bartz

Carol Ann Bartz is an American business executive, the former president and CEO of the Internet services company Yahoo!, and former chairman, president, and CEO at architectural and engineering design software company Autodesk....

, former executive chairman of Autodesk

Autodesk

Autodesk, Inc. is an American multinational corporation that focuses on 3D design software for use in the architecture, engineering, construction, manufacturing, media and entertainment industries. The company was founded in 1982 by John Walker, a coauthor of the first versions of the company's...

, as its new chief executive officer and a member of the board of directors

Board of directors

A board of directors is a body of elected or appointed members who jointly oversee the activities of a company or organization. Other names include board of governors, board of managers, board of regents, board of trustees, and board of visitors...

. On September 6, 2011, Bartz was removed from her position at Yahoo! by chairman Roy Bostock and CFO Tim Morse

Tim Morse

Timothy R. Morse is the interim CEO of the Internet services company, Yahoo!. He was named after Carol Bartz lost her position as CEO on Sept 6, 2011...

was named as Interim CEO of the company.

According to news sources roughly 700 million people visit Yahoo websites every month. Yahoo! itself claims it attracts "more than half a billion consumers every month in more than 30 languages".

History and growth

In January 1994, Jerry Yang and David Filo

David Filo

were electrical engineering graduate students at Stanford University

Stanford University

The Leland Stanford Junior University, commonly referred to as Stanford University or Stanford, is a private research university on an campus located near Palo Alto, California. It is situated in the northwestern Santa Clara Valley on the San Francisco Peninsula, approximately northwest of San...

when they created a website named "David and Jerry's Guide to the World Wide Web". 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!". The yahoo.com domain was created on January 18, 1995. The word is an acronym for "Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle." The term "hierarchical" described how the Yahoo! database was arranged in directory layers. The term "oracle" was intended to mean "source of truth and wisdom," and "officious", rather than being related in any way to the meaning of the word, described the many office workers who would use the Yahoo! database while surfing from work. However, Filo and Yang insist they mainly selected the name because they liked the slang definition of a "yahoo" (used by college students in David Filo's native Louisiana in the late 1980s and early 1990s to refer to an unsophisticated, rural Southerner): "rude, unsophisticated, uncouth." Filo's college girlfriend often referred to Filo as a "yahoo." This meaning derives from the name of a race of fictional beings from Gulliver's Travels.

Yahoo! grew rapidly throughout the 1990s. Like many search engine

Search engine

A search engine is an information retrieval system designed to help find information stored on a computer system. The search results are usually presented in a list and are commonly called hits. Search engines help to minimize the time required to find information and the amount of information...

s and web directories

Web directory

A web directory or link directory is a directory on the World Wide Web. It specializes in linking to other web sites and categorizing those links....

, Yahoo! diversified into a web portal

Web portal

A web portal or links page is a web site that functions as a point of access to information in the World Wide Web. A portal presents information from diverse sources in a unified way....

. It also made many high-profile acquisitions. Its stock price skyrocketed during the dot-com bubble

Dot-com bubble

The dot-com bubble was a speculative bubble covering roughly 1995–2000 during which stock markets in industrialized nations saw their equity value rise rapidly from growth in the more...

, 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

Google

Google Inc. is an American multinational public corporation invested in Internet search, cloud computing, and advertising technologies. Google hosts and develops a number of Internet-based services and products, and generates profit primarily from advertising through its AdWords program...

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

Microsoft

Microsoft Corporation is an American public multinational corporation headquartered in Redmond, Washington, USA that develops, manufactures, licenses, and supports a wide range of products and services predominantly related to computing through its various product divisions...

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. Carol Bartz

Carol Bartz

replaced cofounder Jerry Yang in January 2009. In September 2011 she was removed from her position at Yahoo! by the company's chairman Roy Bostock (via phone call), and CFO Tim Morse

Tim Morse

Timothy R. Morse is the interim CEO of the Internet services company, Yahoo!. He was named after Carol Bartz lost her position as CEO on Sept 6, 2011...

was named as Interim CEO of the company.

Products and services

Yahoo! operates the web portal 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! Mail

, Yahoo! Maps, Yahoo! Finance

Yahoo! Finance

Yahoo! Finance is a service from Yahoo! that provides financial information. It is the top financial news and research website in the United States, with more than 23 million visitors in February 2010, according to comScore....

, Yahoo! Groups

Yahoo! Groups

Yahoo! Groups is one of the world’s largest collections of online discussion boards. The term Groups refers to Internet communication which is a hybrid between an electronic mailing list and a threaded Internet forum, in other words, Group messages can be read and posted by e-mail or on the Group's...

and Yahoo! Messenger

Yahoo! Messenger

Yahoo! Messenger is an advertisement-supported instant messaging client and associated protocol provided by Yahoo!...

Storing personal information and tracking usage

Working with comScore

ComScore

comScore is a Internet marketing research company providing marketing data and services to many of the Internet's largest businesses. comScore tracks all internet data on its surveyed computers in order to study online behavior....

, The New York Times
The New York Times
The New York Times is an American daily newspaper founded and continuously published in New York City since 1851. The New York Times has won 106 Pulitzer Prizes, the most of any news organization...

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.

As of May 22, 2008, an article in Computer World

Computer World

Computer World is the eighth studio album by the German electronic music band Kraftwerk, released in May 1981. The album deals with the themes of the rise of computers within society. Critics see this album as a peak in the career of Kraftwerk, along with Autobahn and Trans-Europe Express...

states that Yahoo has a 2-petabyte, specially built data warehouse

Data warehouse

In computing, a data warehouse is a database used for reporting and analysis. The data stored in the warehouse is uploaded from the operational systems. The data may pass through an operational data store for additional operations before it is used in the DW for reporting.A 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. In contrast the Internal Revenue Services (IRS) database of all US taxpayers weighs in at only 150 TB.

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.

Communication

Yahoo! provides Internet communication services such as Yahoo! Messenger

Yahoo! Messenger

Yahoo! Messenger is an advertisement-supported instant messaging client and associated protocol provided by Yahoo!...

and Yahoo! Mail

Yahoo! Mail

. In March 2007, Yahoo! announced that their e-mail service would offer unlimited storage beginning May 2007.

Yahoo! also offers social networking services and user-generated content in products such as My Web, Yahoo! Personals

Yahoo! Personals

Yahoo! Personals was an online dating service provided by Yahoo!.-Features:Yahoo! Personals editions are designed in local languages. Contacting a member through Yahoo! Personals requires a paid subscription to Yahoo! Personals...

, Yahoo! 360°

Yahoo! 360°

Yahoo! 360° was a social networking and personal communication portal operated by Yahoo! made available in 2005. It enabled users to create personal web sites, share photos from Yahoo! Photos, maintain blogs and lists, create and share a public profile and see which friends are currently online...

, Delicious, Flickr

Flickr

Flickr is an image hosting and video hosting website, web services suite, and online community that was created by Ludicorp in 2004 and acquired by Yahoo! in 2005. In addition to being a popular website for users to share and embed personal photographs, the service is widely used by bloggers to...

and Yahoo! Buzz

Yahoo! Buzz

Yahoo! Buzz was a community-based news article website, heavily derived from Digg, that combines the features of social bookmarking and syndication through a user interface that allows editorial control...

. In December 2010, reports emerged that Yahoo! would be shutting down Yahoo! Buzz

Yahoo! Buzz

, MyBlogLog

MyBlogLog

MyBlogLog was a social network for the blogger community that was based in part on interactions facilitated by a popular web widget that many members install on their blog. Bloggers signed up for free accounts on MyBlogLog and can initiate a blog community for one or more blogs they authored...

, Delicious

Delicious

Delicious may refer to:* Varieties of apples, namely Red Delicious and Golden Delicious* Delicious , a 1931 Hollywood musical* Delicious , a social bookmarking service* "Delicious" , a 1994 song by Sleeper...

and a handful of other products.

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.

Content

Yahoo! partners with numerous content providers in products such as Yahoo! Sports

Yahoo! Sports

Yahoo! Sports was launched on December 8, 1997. It receives a majority of its information from STATS, Inc., employs various writers, and has team pages for teams in almost every North American sport...

, Yahoo! Finance

Yahoo! Finance

, Yahoo! Music

Yahoo! Music

Yahoo! Music, owned by Yahoo!, is the provider of a variety of music services, including Internet radio, music videos, news, artist information, and original programming...

, Yahoo! Movies

Yahoo! Movies

Yahoo! Movies , provided by the Yahoo! network, is home to a large collection of information on movies, past and new releases, trailers and clips, box office information, and showtimes and movie theater information. Yahoo! Movies also includes red carpet photos, actor galleries, and production...

, Yahoo! News

Yahoo! News

, Yahoo! Answers

Yahoo! Answers

and Yahoo! Games

Yahoo! Games

Yahoo! Games is the section of the Yahoo! website in which Yahoo! users can play games either with other users or by themselves. The games on the website are typically Java applets or quick Flash games, but there are others which require a download. Many of the games that require a download...

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.

Co-branded Internet services

Yahoo! has developed partnerships with different broadband providers such as AT&T

AT&T

AT&T Inc. is an American multinational telecommunications corporation headquartered in Whitacre Tower, Dallas, Texas, United States. It is the largest provider of mobile telephony and fixed telephony in the United States, and is also a provider of broadband and subscription television services...

(via BellSouth

BellSouth

BellSouth Corporation is an American telecommunications holding company based in Atlanta, Georgia. BellSouth was one of the seven original Regional Bell Operating Companies after the U.S...

& SBC), Verizon Communications

Verizon Communications

Verizon Communications Inc. is a global broadband and telecommunications company and a component of the Dow Jones Industrial Average...

, Rogers Communications

Rogers Communications

Rogers Communications Inc. is one of Canada's largest communications companies, particularly in the field of wireless communications, cable television, home phone and internet with additional telecommunications and mass media assets...

and British Telecom, offering a range of free and premium Yahoo! content and services to subscribers.

Mobile Services

Yahoo! Mobile offers services for email, instant messaging, and mobile blogging

Mobile blogging

Mobile blogging is a method of publishing to a website or blog from a mobile phone or other handheld device. A moblog helps habitual bloggers to post write-ups directly from their phones even when on the move....

, as well as information services, searches and alerts. Services for the camera phone include entertainment, ring tones, and Yahoo! Photos.

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, along with 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.

Yahoo! uses Novarra's mobile content transcoding service for the oneSearch platform.

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.

Commerce

Yahoo! offers commerce services such as Yahoo! Shopping

Yahoo! Shopping

Yahoo! Shopping is Yahoo's price comparison service.Yahoo uses the Kelkoo price comparison service it acquired in April 2004 to power Yahoo! Shopping in 6 countries.-External links:**...

, Yahoo! Autos, Yahoo! Real Estate

Yahoo! Real Estate

Yahoo! Real Estate was launched by Yahoo! in with the mission to provide home buyers, sellers and renters with the most relevant and comprehensive set of information and tools. With access to over three million homes for sale and apartments for rent, Yahoo! Real estate provides one of the most...

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.

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.

Advertising

Yahoo! Search Marketing

Yahoo! Search Marketing is a keyword-based "Pay per click" or "Sponsored search" Internet advertising service provided by Yahoo!.Yahoo began offering this service after acquiring Overture Services, Inc....

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

Yahoo! Publisher Network

The Yahoo! Publisher Network was an advertising network launched on August 2, 2005 by Yahoo! and effectively closed on April 30, 2010. The service only accepted US-Based publishers...

is an advertising tool for online publishers to place advertisements relevant to their content to monetize their websites.

Yahoo! launched its new Internet advertisement sales system on February 5, 2007, called Panama

Panama (ad system)

Panama is an online advertising platform created by Yahoo!.The new advertising platform is Yahoo’s effort to close the wide gap with Google in the race for search advertising dollars, a fast-growing business currently dominated by Google....

. It allows advertisers

Advertising

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.

On April 7, 2008, Yahoo! announced APT from Yahoo!

APT from Yahoo!

APT from Yahoo! is a recently launched online advertising management platform from Yahoo!. Announced on 7 April 2008, the service seeks to make selling and purchasing ads easier through a common interface...

, which was originally called AMP! from Yahoo!, an online advertising management platform. The platform seeks to simplify advertising sales by unifying buyer and seller markets. The service was launched in September 2008.

In September 2011, Yahoo formed an ad selling strategic partnership with 2 of its top competitors, AOL and Microsoft.

Yahoo! Next

Yahoo! Next is a showcase of some of Yahoo!'s newest and upcoming projects. It is essentially an incubation ground for future Yahoo! technologies in their beta testing phase, and a chance for the Yahoo! community to interact and have a say on how upcoming products are designed and fine tuned. Each...

is an incubation ground for future Yahoo! technologies currently in their beta testing phase. It contains forums

Internet forum

An Internet forum, or message board, is an online discussion site where people can hold conversations in the form of posted messages. They differ from chat rooms in that messages are at least temporarily archived...

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.

Yahoo! BOSS

Yahoo! Search BOSS

Yahoo! Search BOSS is a Yahoo! Developer Network initiative to provide an open search web services platform.- Description :...

is a service that allows developers to build search applications based on Yahoo!'s search technology. Early Partners in the program include Hakia

Hakia

hakia is an Internet search engine. The company has invented QDEXing technology, an alternative new infrastructure to indexing that uses SemanticRank algorithm, a solution mix from the disciplines of ontological semantics, fuzzy logic, computational linguistics, and mathematics...

, Me.dium

Me.dium

OneRiot is an advertising network for the realtime, social web. The company partners with brands and media companies to reach millions of users across Twitter apps, mobile apps, social networks and content discovery sites. OneRiot is a privately held company headquartered in Boulder,...

, Delver, Daylife

Daylife

Daylife offers on-demand features and media apps served from the cloud. It provides digital media management tools and content feeds to publishers, brand marketers, and developers. Daylife was founded in 2006 and has raised $15M investment to date, most recently from strategic investor Getty Images...

and Yebol

Yebol

Yebol is a vertical "decision" search engine that had developed a knowledge-based, semantic search platform. Based in San Jose, CA, Yebol's artificial intelligence human intelligence-infused algorithms automatically cluster and categorize search results, web sites, pages and contents that it...

.
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.

Yahoo! Meme

Yahoo! Meme is a beta social service, similar to the popular social networking sites Twitter

Twitter

Twitter is an online social networking and microblogging service that enables its users to send and read text-based posts of up to 140 characters, informally known as "tweets".Twitter was created in March 2006 by Jack Dorsey and launched that July...

and Jaiku

Jaiku

Jaiku is a social networking, micro-blogging and lifestreaming service comparable to Twitter. Jaiku was founded in February 2006 by Jyri Engeström and Petteri Koponen from Finland and launched in July of that year...

Yahoo! Koprol

Yahoo! Koprol is an Indonesia

Indonesia

Indonesia , officially the Republic of Indonesia , is a country in Southeast Asia and Oceania. Indonesia is an archipelago comprising approximately 13,000 islands. It has 33 provinces with over 238 million people, and is the world's fourth most populous country. Indonesia is a republic, with an...

n social networking site based on location without the use of any GPS devices.
Koprol was bought by Yahoo in May 2011 with 75,000 users. Koprol has accrued 1.5 million users as of early July 2011 at one year old.

Y!Connect

Y!Connect is a feature that enables individuals to leave comments in online publication boards by using their Yahoo ID, instead of having to register with each individual publication. The Wall Street Journal

The Wall Street Journal

The Wall Street Journal is an American English-language international daily newspaper. It is published in New York City by Dow Jones & Company, a division of News Corporation, along with the Asian and European editions of the Journal....

reported that Yahoo plans to mimic this strategy used by rival Facebook Inc. to help drive traffic to its site.

Closed down services

Geocities

GeoCities

Yahoo! GeoCities is a web hosting service, currently available only in Japan.GeoCities was originally founded by David Bohnett and John Rezner in late 1994 as Beverly Hills Internet . In its original form, site users selected a "city" in which to place their web pages...

was a popular web hosting service founded in 1994. At one point it was the third-most-browsed site on the World Wide Web. Yahoo! purchased Geocities in 1999, and ten years later, the web host was closed, deleting millions of web pages in the process. A great deal of information was lost but many of those sites and pages have been mirrored at the Internet Archive

Internet Archive

The Internet Archive is a non-profit digital library with the stated mission of "universal access to all knowledge". It offers permanent storage and access to collections of digitized materials, including websites, music, moving images, and nearly 3 million public domain books. The Internet Archive...

, "OOcities.com", and other such databases.

Yahoo! Go

Yahoo! Go

Yahoo! Go was a Java-based phone application provided by Yahoo! for users to access the company's products and services via their mobile phones or PDAs...

, a Java-based phone application with access to most of Yahoo! services, was closed down on January 12, 2010.

Yahoo! 360°

Yahoo! 360°

was a blogging/social networking beta service launched in March 2005 by Yahoo! and closed on July 13, 2009. Yahoo! Mash beta was another social service closed after one year of operation prior to leaving beta status.

Yahoo! Photos was shut down on September 20, 2007, in favor of integration with Flickr

Flickr

. Yahoo! Tech

Yahoo! Tech

Yahoo! Tech was a web site that provided product information and setup advice to help its users, as expressed in its slogan "Tech Made Easy." Yahoo! launched the web site in May 2006...

was a website that provided product information and setup advice to users. Yahoo! launched the website in May 2006. On March 11, 2010, Yahoo! closed down the service and redirected users to Yahoo!'s technology news section. Other discontinued services include Farechase, My Web, Audio Search, Pets, Live, Kickstart, Briefcase, and Yahoo! for Teachers.

Hotjobs was acquired by and merged with Monster.com

Monster.com

Monster.com is one of the largest employment websites in the world, owned and operated by Monster Worldwide, Inc. Monster is one of the 20 most visited websites out of 100 million worldwide, according to comScore Media Metrics...

Twitter slide leak on upcoming changes to Yahoo

On December 15, 2010, one day after Yahoo announced layoffs of 4% of its workers across their portfolio, MyBlogLog

MyBlogLog

founder Eric Marcoullier posted a slide from a Yahoo employee on Twitter. The slide was visible during an employee-only strategy webcast indicating changes in Yahoo's offerings.

The following services were in a column under "Sunset": Yahoo Picks, AltaVista

AltaVista

AltaVista is a web search engine owned by Yahoo!. AltaVista was once one of the most popular search engines but its popularity declined with the rise of Google...

, MyM, AlltheWeb

AlltheWeb

AlltheWeb was an Internet search engine that made its debut in mid-1999. It grew out of FTP Search, Tor Egge's doctorate thesis at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, which he started in 1994, which in turn resulted in the formation of Fast Search and Transfer, established on July...

, Yahoo Bookmarks, Yahoo! Buzz

Yahoo! Buzz

, del.icio.us

Del.icio.us

Delicious is a social bookmarking web service for storing, sharing, and discovering web bookmarks. The site was founded by Joshua Schachter in 2003 and acquired by Yahoo! in 2005, and by the end of 2008, the service claimed more than 5.3 million users and 180 million unique bookmarked URLs...

, and MyBlogLog

MyBlogLog

. Under "Merge" was: Upcoming, FoxyTunes

FoxyTunes

FoxyTunes is a browser extension which was acquired by Yahoo! on February 4, 2008. The program allows the user to control media players from the browser window...

, Yahoo Events, Yahoo People Search, Sideline, and FireEagle.

11 other properties were listed that Yahoo was interested in developing into feature sites within the portal to take the place of the "Sunset" and "Merge" vacancies, including the prior feature services (before the New Yahoo Mail was launched), were Yahoo Address Book, Calendar, and Notepad. Yahoo's Chief Product Officer and Executive Vice President Blake Irving unofficially responded to the tweet implying that whoever sent him that particular slide is fired.

The blog on del.icio.us

Del.icio.us

released a post by Chris Yeh after the leak, detailing that "Sunset" in their case doesn't necessarily mean they are closing down, and that other possibilities – including Delicious leaving Yahoo (through sale or spinoff) – are still on the table and that Delicious will not be closing down at this time; "We can only imagine how upsetting the news coverage over the past 24 hours has been to many of you. Speaking for our team, we were very disappointed by the way that this appeared in the press." On April 27, 2011, an announcement said that Delicious has been sold to Avos by Yahoo!
Yahoo! Buzz was closed down on April 21, 2011 with no official announcement by Yahoo!

Yahoo! announced it will close down MyBlogLog on May 24, 2011

Revenue model

About 88% of total revenues for the fiscal year 2009 came from marketing services. The largest segment of it comes from search advertising, where advertisers bid for search terms to display their ads on the search results, on average Yahoo! makes 2.5 cents to 3 cents from each search. With the search advertising system "Panama" Yahoo! aims to increase revenue generated from search.

Other forms of advertising which bring in revenue for Yahoo! include display and contextual advertising.

Criticism

In 2000, Yahoo! was taken to court in France

LICRA v. Yahoo!

Ligue contre le racisme et l'antisémitisme et Union des étudiants juifs de France c. Yahoo! Inc. et Société Yahoo! France is a French court case decided by the High Court of Paris in 2000. The case concerned the sale of memorabilia from the Nazi period by internet auction and the application of...

by parties seeking to prevent French citizens from purchasing memorabilia relating to the Nazi Party. In March 2004, Yahoo! launched a paid inclusion program whereby commercial websites are guaranteed listings on the Yahoo! search engine, but Yahoo! discontinued the paid inclusion / search submit program at the end of 2009. Yahoo! has also been criticized for providing ads via the Yahoo! ad network to companies who display them through spyware

Spyware

Spyware is a type of malware that can be installed on computers, and which collects small pieces of information about users without their knowledge. The presence of spyware is typically hidden from the user, and can be difficult to detect. Typically, spyware is secretly installed on the user's...

and adware

Adware

Adware, or advertising-supported software, is any software package which automatically plays, displays, or downloads advertisements to a computer. These advertisements can be in the form of a pop-up. They may also be in the user interface of the software or on a screen presented to the user during...

.

Yahoo! as well as other search engines, have cooperated with the Chinese government in censoring

Internet censorship in the People's Republic of China

Internet censorship in the People's Republic of China is conducted under a wide variety of laws and administrative regulations. There are no specific laws or regulations which the censorship follows...

search results. In April 2005, dissident Shi Tao

Shi Tao

Shi Tao is a mainland Chinese journalist, writer and poet, who in 2005 was sentenced to imprisonment for 10 years for releasing a document of the Communist Party to an overseas Chinese democracy site after Yahoo! China provided his personal details to the Chinese government.-Brief history:Shi Tao...

was sentenced to 10 years in prison for "providing state secrets to foreign entities" as a result of being identified by IP address by Yahoo! The extent of Yahoo's foreknowledge of Shi's fate is disputed by Yahoo! General Counsel and human rights organizations. Human rights groups also accuse Yahoo! of aiding authorities in the arrest of dissident

Dissident

A dissident, broadly defined, is a person who actively challenges an established doctrine, policy, or institution. When dissidents unite for a common cause they often effect a dissident movement....

Li Zhi. In September 2003, dissident Wang Xiaoning

Wang Xiaoning

Wang Xiaoning is a Chinese dissident from Shenyang who was arrested by authorities of the People's Republic of China for publishing controversial material online using his Yahoo! email account....

was convicted of charges of "incitement to subvert state power" and sentenced to ten years in prison. Yahoo! helped authorities to identify posts he had made in a Yahoo! group calling for an end to single-party rule. Both Xiaoning's wife and the World Organization for Human Rights sued Yahoo! under human rights laws on behalf of Wang and Shi.

As a result of media scrutiny relating to Internet child predators and a lack of significant ad revenues, Yahoo!'s "user created" chatrooms were closed down in June 2005. On May 25, 2006, Yahoo!'s image search was criticized for bringing up sexually explicit images even when SafeSearch was on. Yahoo! is a 40% owner of Alibaba Group, which was previously a subject of controversy for allowing the sale of shark-derived products. Nevertheless, the company banned the sale of shark fin products on all its e-commerce platforms in January 1, 2009. On November 30, 2009, Yahoo! was criticized by the Electronic Frontier Foundation

Electronic Frontier Foundation

The Electronic Frontier Foundation is an international non-profit digital rights advocacy and legal organization based in the United States...

for sending a DMCA notice to whistle-blower website "Cryptome" for publicly posting details, prices, and procedures on obtaining private information pertaining to Yahoo!'s subscribers.

After some concerns over censorship of private emails regarding a website affiliated with Occupy Wall Street

Occupy Wall Street

Occupy Wall Street is an ongoing series of demonstrations initiated by the Canadian activist group Adbusters which began September 17, 2011 in Zuccotti Park, located in New York City's Wall Street financial district...

protests were raised, Yahoo responded with an apology and explained it as an accident.

Yahoo subject of cyber attacks originating in China

Adobe and Yahoo appear to have been among the targets of cyber attacks originating in China that prompted Google Inc. to threaten to leave the Asian nation in a surprise announcement on January 12, 2010.

Financial data

Financial data, US$ million
Year	2003	2004	2005	2006	2007	2008	2009	2010
Sales Sales A sale is the act of selling a product or service in return for money or other compensation. It is an act of completion of a commercial activity....	1,625	3,574	5,258	6,426	6,969	7,208	6,460	6,324
EBITDA EBITDA EBITDA is an acronym for earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization. It is a non-GAAP metric that is measured exactly as stated. All interest, tax, depreciation and amortization entries in the income statement are reversed out from the bottom-line net income...	453	1,000	1,505	1,066
Net Results Net profit Net profit or net revenue is a measure of the profitability of a venture after accounting for all costs. In a survey of nearly 200 senior marketing managers, 91 percent responded that they found the "net profit" metric very useful...	238	840	1,896	751	660	424	597	1,231
Staff	5,500	7,600	9,800	11,400			13,900	13,600

Advertising Revenue

As of January, 2010, Yahoo held the world's largest market share in online display advertising

Display advertising

Display advertising is a type of advertising that typically contains text , logos, photographs or other images, location maps, and similar items. In periodicals, display advertising can appear on the same page as, or on the page adjacent to, general editorial content...

. JP Morgan put the company’s US market share for display ads at 17%, well ahead of No. 2 Microsoft at 11% and AOL at 7%.

Yahoo! International

Yahoo! is known across the world with its multi-lingual interface. The site is available in over 20 languages, including English. The official directory for all of the Yahoo! International sites is world.yahoo.com.

Each of the international sites are wholly owned by Yahoo!, with the exception of Yahoo! Japan

Yahoo! Japan

is a Japanese internet company formed as a joint venture between the American internet company Yahoo! and the Japanese internet company SoftBank. It is headquartered at Midtown Tower in the Tokyo Midtown complex in Akasaka, Minato, Tokyo.-History:...

, in which it holds a 34.75% minority SoftBank

SoftBank

is a Japanese telecommunications and internet corporation, with operations in broadband, fixed-line telecommunications, e-Commerce, Internet, broadmedia, technology services, finance, media and marketing, and other businesses....

holds 35.45%, Yahoo!Xtra

Yahoo!Xtra

Yahoo!Xtra was a New Zealand web portal that existed under that name from 2007 to 2011. It was a joint venture between Yahoo!7 and Telecom New Zealand. Yahoo!7 held a 51 percent stake in the company and Telecom NZ held 49 percent. Because Yahoo!7 is a 50/50 venture, Yahoo! proper was therefore a...

in New Zealand which Yahoo!7

Yahoo!7

Yahoo!7 is a 50-50 partnership between the Seven Network and Yahoo! Inc. in Australia.As part of the Yahoo! Inc. and the Seven Media Group, Yahoo!7 brings together the online assets of Yahoo! Inc. and the television and magazine content of the Seven Network and Pacific Magazines...

have 51% of and 49% belongs to Telecom New Zealand

Telecom New Zealand

Telecom New Zealand is a New Zealand-wide communications service provider , providing fixed line telephone services, a mobile network, an internet service provider , a major ICT provider to NZ businesses , and a wholesale network infrastructure provider to other NZ CSPs...

and Yahoo!7 in Australia which is a 50-50 agreement between Yahoo! and the Seven Network

Seven Network

The Seven Network is an Australian television network owned by Seven West Media Limited. It dates back to 4 November 1956, when the first stations on the VHF7 frequency were established in Melbourne and Sydney.It is currently the second largest network in the country in terms of population reach...

. Historically, Yahoo! entered into joint venture agreements with SoftBank

SoftBank

for the major European sites (UK, France, Germany) and well as Korea and Japan. In November 2005, Yahoo! purchased the minority interests that SoftBank owned in Europe and Korea.

Yahoo! holds a 40% stake in Alibaba, which manages a web portal in China using the Yahoo! brand name. Yahoo! in the USA does not have direct control over the operations of Alibaba, which operates as a completely independent company.

In 2008, Darren Petterson, business development director for Yahoo! Europe confirmed that Yahoo! was going to launch a Romania

Romania

Romania is a country located at the crossroads of Central and Southeastern Europe, on the Lower Danube, within and outside the Carpathian arch, bordering on the Black Sea...

n version of their website by the end of the year, however, due to the financial crisis at that time, those plans were frozen. In February 2010, new reports appeared in the Romanian media claiming that the portal will finally launch by June the same year, as some services like Yahoo! Mail and Yahoo! Mobile are already translated into Romanian

Romanian language

Romanian Romanian Romanian (or Daco-Romanian; obsolete spellings Rumanian, Roumanian; self-designation: română, limba română ("the Romanian language") or românește (lit. "in Romanian") is a Romance language spoken by around 24 to 28 million people, primarily in Romania and Moldova...

.
On 8 March 2011 Yahoo! launched its Romania local service.

Logos and themes

The first logo was used when the company was founded in 1995. It was red and had three icons on each side.

The logo used on the main page yahoo.com used to be red with a black outline and shadow, but in May 2009, along with a new theme redesign, the logo was changed to purple with no outline or shadow.

Sometimes, the logo is abbreviated with Y!.

Themes and page designs are different on some international Yahoo! home pages, such as Yahoo! Australia, Yahoo! India, etc

External links

The source of this article is wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. The text of this article is licensed under the GFDL.

History and growth

Products and services

Storing personal information and tracking usage

Communication

Content

Co-branded Internet services

Mobile Services

Commerce

Small business

Advertising

Yahoo! Next

Yahoo! BOSS

Yahoo! Meme

Yahoo! Koprol

Y!Connect

Closed down services

Twitter slide leak on upcoming changes to Yahoo

Revenue model

Criticism

Yahoo subject of cyber attacks originating in China

Financial data

Advertising Revenue

Yahoo! International

Logos and themes

See also

External links