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Yahoo! Inc. () is an American internet services company. It operates an Internet portal and provides a full range of products and services including a search engine, the Yahoo! Directory and Yahoo! Mail. It was founded by Stanford graduate students Jerry Yang and David Filo on January of 1994 and incorporated on March 2, 1995. The company is headquartered in Sunnyvale, California. According to Web trends companies Alexa Internet and Netcraft, Yahoo! is the most visited website on the Internet today with more than 412 million unique users. The global network of Yahoo! websites received 3.4 billion page views per day on average as of October 2005.
History Yahoo! started out as "Jerry's Guide to the World Wide Web", a web site featuring a directory of other sites, organized in a hierarchy (rather than a searchable index of pages). It was renamed "Yahoo!" shortly thereafter. "Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle" is a backronym for this name, but Filo and Yang insist they selected the name because they liked the word's general definition, as in Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift: "rude, unsophisticated, uncouth."* As the backronymed version of the name implies, it was not the first directory of its kind, but it was the first to become widely popular as "the" directory of the fledgling Web. Yahoo! itself first resided on Yang's student workstation, "Akebono", while the software was lodged on Filo's computer, "Konishiki", both named after famous 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, raising $338 million, by selling 2.6 million shares at USA$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, Yahoo! Messenger, an instant messaging client, a very popular mailing list service (Yahoo! Groups), online gaming and chat, various news and information portals, online shopping and online 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 is 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! and eBay were discussing a 50/50 merger.*, Although the merger never materialised the two companies decided to form a marketing/advertising alliance six years later in 2006. * Yahoo! has partnerships with telecommunications and Internet providers - such as BT in the UK, Rogers in Canada, and AT&T, Verizon* 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 Chase. Beginning in late 2002, Yahoo! began to bolster its search services by acquiring relevant companies. In December 2002, Yahoo! acquired Inktomi, and in July 2003, it acquired Overture Services, Inc. and its subsidiaries AltaVista and AlltheWeb. 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. In June 2005 Yahoo! acquired blo.gs, a service based on RSS feed aggregation, primarily from weblogs (hence the name), which produces a simple list (and also an RSS feed thereof) of freshly updated Weblogs, ordered according to recentness of update. blo.gs was the first Internet company hosted on a domain hack Yahoo! acquired, del.icio.us being the second. Important events Yahoo! Research Labs Yahoo! Research has seven research labs: Yahoo! Next Yahoo! Next is essentially incubation ground for future Yahoo! technologies in their beta testing phase, a chance for the Yahoo! community to interact and have a say on how upcoming products are designed and fine-tuned. Each prototype can be discussed in its own individual Yahoo! Next forum. Criticism and controversy Yahoo! paid inclusion controversy In March 2004, Yahoo! launched a paid inclusion program whereby commercial websites are guaranteed listings on the Yahoo search engine after payment. This scheme is lucrative, but has proved unpopular both with website marketers (who are reluctant to pay), and the public (who are unhappy about the paid-for listings being indistinguishable from other search results). As of Oct 2006, Paid Inclusion doesn't guarantee any commercial listing, it only helps the paid inclusion customers, by crawling their site more often and by providing some statistics on the searches that led to the page and some additional smart links (provided by customers as feeds) below the actual url. Yahoo! has also been criticised for funding spyware and adware — advertising from Yahoo!'s clients often appears on-screen in pop-ups generated from adware that a user may have installed on their computer without realising it by accepting online offers to download software to fix computer clocks or improve computer security, add browser enhancements, etc. Similarly, Yahoo! has received adverse comment for bundling their Yahoo! toolbar with other software (Macromedia Flash 8 is an example) with installation being the default setting. The toolbar itself has been noted as taking up a lot of screen-space when installed. Also Windows users will find themselves unable to uninstall the toolbar by normal means on Internet Explorer. It can be uninstalled normally on Firefox. Censorship Yahoo!, along with Google China, Microsoft, Cisco, AOL, Skype, and others, has cooperated with the Chinese government in implementing a system of Internet censorship in mainland China. Many critics of these corporate policies argue that it is wrong for companies to profit from censorship and restrictions on freedom of the press and freedom of speech. Human rights advocates such as Human Rights Watch and media groups such as Reporters Without Borders point out that if companies would stop contributing to the authorities' censorship efforts the government could be forced to change. Chinese blogger imprisonment controversy In April 2005, Shi Tao, a journalist working for a Chinese newspaper, was sentenced to 10 years in prison by the Changsha Intermediate People's Court of Hunan Province, China (First trial case no 29), for "providing state secrets to foreign entities". The "secret", as Shi Tao's family claimed, refers to a brief list of censorship orders he sent from a Yahoo! Mail account to the Asia Democracy Forum before the anniversary of Tiananmen Square Incident.* The verdict stated Yahoo! Holdings (Hong Kong) confirmed that an IP address, registered by a Hunan newspaper that Shi Tao worked for, accessed to the mail account at a particular time. He had sent the message through an anonymous Yahoo! account, but police had gone straight to his offices and picked him up. Reporters Without Borders (RSF) is concerned with the ease with which Mr Shi had been caught. In April 2006, Yahoo! Holdings (Hong Kong) is under investigation by Hong Kong's Privacy Commissioner for Personal Data. Criticism of Yahoo! intensified when the court document stated the company aided Chinese authorities in the case of dissident Li Zhi. In December 2003 Li Zhi was sentenced to 8 years imprisonment for "inciting subversion". In recent months Yahoo! has also followed the directive of United States government officials in turning over information which the United States deems as key for continuing its global "war on terror". Yahoo! contends it must respect the laws of governments in jurisdictions where it is operating. On 2 June 2006, the union representing journalists in the UK and Ireland (NUJ) called on its 40,000 members to boycott all Yahoo! Inc. products and services to protest the Internet company's reported actions in China. * Mail certification In February 2006, Yahoo! also announced their decision (along with AOL) to give some organizations the option to "certify" mail, by paying up to one cent for each outgoing message, allowing the mail in question to bypass Yahoo's and AOL's inbound spam filters.* Yahoo! Mail user name bans On February 20, 2006, it was revealed that Yahoo! Mail was banning the word "allah" in e-mail user names, both separate and as part of a user name such as linda.callahan. * Shortly after the news of the "allah" ban became widespread in media, it was lifted in February 23, 2006. Along with this action, Yahoo! also spoke up on this issue: "We continuously evaluate abuse patterns in registration usernames to help prevent spam, fraud and other inappropriate behavior. A small number of people registered for IDs using specific terms with the sole purpose of promoting hate, and then used those IDs to post content that was harmful or threatening to others, thus violating Yahoo!'s Terms of Service. Allah' was one word being used for these purposes, with instances tied to defamatory language. We took steps to help protect our users by prohibiting use of the term in Yahoo! usernames. We recently re-evaluated the term 'Allah' and users can now register for IDs with this word because it is no longer a significant target for abuse. We regularly evaluate this type of activity and will continue to make adjustments to our registration process to help foster a positive customer experience." Chatrooms and message boards 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.* Image search On May 25 2006, Yahoo!'s image search was criticised for bringing up sexually explicit images even when SafeSearch was on. This was discovered by a teacher who was intending to use the service with a class to search for "www". Yahoo!'s response to this was, "Yahoo! is aware of this issue and is working to resolve it as quickly as possible". *. See also Yahoo!-owned sites and services This is a partial, alphabetized list. For a complete listing of the services see List of Yahoo! services. Information about Yahoo! | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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