Yahoo

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Yahoo! Inc. (NASDAQ: YHOO) is an American global 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 in January of 1994 and incorporated on March 2, 1995. The company is headquartered in Sunnyvale, California.

According to Web trends companies among others Alexa Internet and Netcraft, Yahoo! has been the most visited website on the Internet 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, making it one of the most visited U.S. websites.

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Products and services

Yahoo! provides a wide array of internet services that cater to most online activities. It operates the web portal http://www.yahoo.com which provides contents including the latest news, Yahoo! Finance and gives users quick access to other Yahoo! services like Yahoo! Mail, Yahoo! Maps, Yahoo! Groups and Yahoo! Messenger.

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Search

Yahoo! Search is the second largest search engine on the internet, Yahoo! also provides vertical search services such as Yahoo! Image, Yahoo! Video, Yahoo! Local, Yahoo! News, and Yahoo! Shopping Search.

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Content

Yahoo! partners with hundreds of premier content providers in products such as Yahoo! Sports, Yahoo! Finance, Yahoo! Music, Yahoo! Movies, Yahoo! News, and Yahoo! Games to provide media contents and news. Yahoo! also provides a personalization service My Yahoo!, which enables users to collect their favorite Yahoo! features, content feeds, and information into a single page.

Yahoo! has developed partnerships with different broadband providers such as SBC, Verizon, Bellsouth, Rogers Canada and British Telecom, offering a range of free and premium Yahoo! content and services to subscribers.

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Mobile

Yahoo! Mobile includes services for on-the-go messaging, such as email, instant messaging, and moblogging; information, such as search and alerts; and fun and games, including ringtones, mobile games, and Yahoo! Photos for camera phones.

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OneSearch

Yahoo 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 search 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, 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 a certain information the user is trying to make.

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Commerce

Yahoo! offers commerce services such as Yahoo! Shopping, Yahoo! Autos, Yahoo! Auctions, and Yahoo! Travel, which enables users to gather relevant information and make commercial transactions and purchases online.

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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.

Yahoo! also offers HotJobs to help recruiters find the talent they seek.

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Advertising

Yahoo! Search Marketing provides services such as Sponsored Search, Local Advertising, and Product/Travel/Directory Submit that let different businesses advertise their products and services in the Yahoo! network. Yahoo! Publisher Network 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. It allows advertisers to bid for search terms based on their popularity to display their ads on search results pages. The system takes bids, ad quality, click-through 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 show

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Revenue model

Yahoo!'s revenue comes from online advertising. 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 new 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

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مدیرعامل یاهو استعفا کرد

جری ینگ بخاطر افت قابل ملاحظه ارزش سهام یاهو به شدت مورد انتقاد قرار داشت
جری ینگ، یکی از بنیانگذاران یاهو، از سمت مدیرعاملی این شرکت که بخاطر پورتال اینترنتی خود شهرت دارد، کناره گیری می کند.

کناره گیری او در پی سقوط قیمت سهام این شرکت به 10 دلار و انتقادهای فراوانی که از نحوه نظارت او بر عملکرد این شرکت مطرح شد، رخ داده است.

او در اوایل سال جاری میلادی حداکثر تلاش خود را بکار گرفت تا از خریده شدن شرکت یاهو توسط مایکروسافت (به ازاء مبلغ پیشنهادی 33 دلار برای هر سهم) جلوگیری کند.

آقای ینگ همچنین به کارمندان خود گفته بود که در جستجو برای یافتن فرد جایگزین خود مشارکت خواهد کرد.

او در ئی میلی که خطاب بهکارمندان یاهو فرستاد نوشت: "من همیشه کاری را انجام خواهم داد که به نفع شرکت است."

برخی منابع معتبر به بی بی سی گفته اند که آقای یانگ در ماه گذشته میلادی تصمیم کناره گیری خود را گرفت. با این حال هنوز مشخص نیست چه کسی جایگزین او خواهد شد.

روی بوستوک رئیس یاهو گفت این شرکت مستقر در سانی ویل ایالت کالیفورنیا مشغول مصاحبه با نامزدهای مدیر عاملی این شرکت از میان افراد درون و بیرون از شرکت یاهو است.

او افزود:"جری و هیئت مدیره گفتگوهایی درباره زمان جایگزینی او داشته اند و ما همه توافق داریم که اکنون زمان مناسبی برای تعیین مدیرعامل جدیدی است که بتواند شرکت را یک پله بالاتر ببرد."

قیمت پایین سهام
آقای ینگ در اوایل ماه جاری در اجلاس وب 2.0 در سان فرانسیسکو با گفتن اینکه مایکروسافت هنوز باید یاهو را بخرد، حضار را شگفت زده کرد.

او در جمع حاضران سخنرانی خود گفت: "به هیچ وجه فکر نمی کنم [خرید یاهو از سوی مایکروسافت] با قیمت مناسب فکر بدی باشد. ما مایلیم شرکت را بفروشیم."

این اظهارات او تنها چند ساعت پس از آن مطرح شد که گوگل همزمان با افزایش تحقیقات از سوی وزارت دادگستری آمریکا، از یک معاهده مشارکت در تبلیغات اینترنتی با یاهو کناره گیری کرد؛ مسئله ای که آقای ینگ از آن ابراز "ناراحتی و نا امیدی" کرد.

آقای ینگ در ئی میل آخر خود به کارمندان یاهو، با اشاره به رنگ غالب بنفش در آرم این شرکت نوشت: "همه شما می دانید که خون من همیشه بنفش خواهد ماند."

سهام شرکت یاهو در روز پیش از کناره گیری آقای ینگ 10.63 دلار قیمت داشت که ارزش این شرکت را به تنها 14.7 میلیارد دلار رساند.

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Yahoo 360 to Close in July

Yahoo announced that it would close its blog centric social networking site Yahoo 360 on July 13. The company initially said that it would be closing the site in October 2007 and planned to do so in early 2008. It delayed the plans to the second half of 2008 but because Yahoo Profiles wasn't ready until October, it had to postpone that again.

In an e-mail to Yahoo 360 members, the company said, "We will be officially closing Yahoo 360 on July 13, 2009, to focus our efforts on making your new profile on Yahoo the place where you connect with the people who matter to you most.

As a result, you will need to move your 360 information to your new profile before this date. After July 12, 2009, your content on Yahoo 360 will no longer be accessible."

Yahoo 360 was launched in March 2005 in an attempt to compete in the social networking market. Its main focus was blogging but it also had many social networking components. However, it failed to compete with the likes of Facebook or MySpace and also was outpaced by more popular blogging platforms.

Yahoo wants 360 users to migrate to its new Yahoo Profiles service that has some basic social networking functions. It has admitted that the new service is somewhat lacking compared with 360, as Mellisa Daniels, Yahoo community manger, wrote in the blog announcement.

"At this time, your new profile does not have all the features and functionality of your 360 profile. However, we are looking at incorporating new ways of expressing yourself through your profile," Daniels revealed. "In regards to uploading multiple photos, your profile on Yahoo allows for only one primary photo for now. This is also something we're looking at improving/expanding based on your feedback."

Yahoo 360 plans to help its users migrate to Yahoo Profiles but also other platforms and is offering tools for them to do so. Yahoo 360 had some degree of success in countries outside the US and is hugely popular in Vietnam. Users in that country will be able to transfer their content to Yahoo 360Plus, which Yahoo has created especially for that market.