Yahoo!

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Yahoo! Inc.
Type Public (NASDAQ: YHOO)
Founded Sunnyvale, California (1995)
Location Sunnyvale, California
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 image:green up.png$3.57 billion USD (2004)
Employees 7,631 (2004)
Website www.yahoo.com

For other uses, see Yahoo.

Yahoo! Inc. (NASDAQ: YHOO) 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.

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History

Screenshot of Yahoo's homepage November 13th, 2004
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Screenshot of Yahoo's homepage November 13th, 2004
Yahoo! headquarters in Sunnyvale
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Yahoo! headquarters in Sunnyvale
Security checkpoint at entrance to headquarters parking lot (most Silicon Valley companies do not have these)
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Security checkpoint at entrance to headquarters parking lot (most Silicon Valley companies do not have these)

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.

At the pinnacle of the Internet boom in the year 2000, the cable news station CNBC reported that Yahoo! Inc. and eBay were in discussions to initiate a 50/50 merger [1].

Yahoo has partnerships with telecommunications and Internet providers - such as BT in the UK, Rogers in Canada and SBC ,Verizon [2]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 First USA.

Beginning in late 2002, Yahoo quietly began to bolster its search services by acquiring competing technologies. In December 2002, it acquired Inktomi, and in July 2003, it acquired Overture Services, Inc., and through it, search sites AltaVista and AlltheWeb. On February 18, 2004, Yahoo dropped Google-powered results and returned to using its own technology to provide search results.

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. No news story, however sacrosanct, is spared.

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Controversy

In April 2005, Shi Tao, a journalist working for a Chinese newspaper, was sentenced to 10 years in prison by the Changsa Intermediate People's Court of Hunan Province, China (First trial case no 29), for "providing state secrets to foreign entities". He had passed details of a censorship order to the Asia Democracy Forum and the website Democracy News. The pressure group Reporters Without Borders (RSF) investigated the case, specifically the ease with which Mr Tao had been caught. He had sent the message through an anonymous Yahoo! account. But police had gone straight to his offices and picked him up. RSF later obtained a translation of the verdict which stated that Mr Tao's account information, telephone number and address were "furnished by Yahoo! Holdings".

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Important events

Please note that this list is merely partial.

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Yahoo! Research Labs

Yahoo! has 3 research labs:

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See also

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External links

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Yahoo-owned sites and services

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

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Information about Yahoo

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Opposition to Yahoo

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