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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History and growth

Early history (1994-1996)
In January 1994, Stanford graduate students Jerry Yang (楊致遠) and David Filo created a website named "Jerry's Guide to the World Wide Web". Jerry's Guide to the World Wide Web was a directory of other web sites, organized in a hierarchy, as opposed to a searchable index of pages.

In April 1994, "Jerry's Guide to the World Wide Web" was renamed "Yahoo!". Filo and Yang said they selected the name because they liked the word's general definition, as in Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift: "rude, unsophisticated, uncouth." The name can also be a backronym for "Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle".

By the end of 1994, Yahoo! had already received one million hits. Yang and Filo realized their website had massive business potential, and on 2 March 1995, Yahoo! was incorporated. On 12 April 1996, Yahoo! had its initial public offering, raising $33.8 million dollars, by selling 2.6 million shares at $13 each.

"Yahoo" had already been trademarked for barbecue sauce, knives (by EBSCO Industries) and human propelled watercraft (by Old Town Canoe Co.). Therefore, in order to get the trademark, Yang and Filo added the exclamation mark to the name. However, the exclamation mark is often incorrectly omitted when referring to Yahoo!.


Growth (1997-1999)
Like many search engines and web directories, Yahoo! diversified into a Web portal. In the late 1990s, Yahoo!, MSN, Lycos, Excite and other Web portals were growing rapidly. Web portal providers rushed to acquire companies to expand their range of services, in the hope of increasing the time a user stays at the portal.

On 8 March 1997, Yahoo! acquired online communications company Four11. Four11's webmail service, Rocketmail, became Yahoo! Mail. Yahoo! also acquired ClassicGames.com and turned it into Yahoo! Games. Yahoo! then acquired direct marketing company Yoyodyne Entertainment, Inc. on 12 October 1998.On 28 January 1999, Yahoo! acquired web hosting provider GeoCities. Another company Yahoo! acquired was eGroups, which became Yahoo! Groups after the acquisition on 28 June 2000. Yahoo! also launched Yahoo! Messenger on 21 July 1999.

When acquiring companies, Yahoo! often changed the relevant terms of service. For example, they claimed intellectual property rights for content on their servers, unlike the companies they acquired. As a result, many of the acquisitions were controversial and unpopular with users of the existing services.


Dot-com bubble (2000-2001)
On 3 January 2000, at the height of the Dot-com boom, Yahoo! stocks closed at an all-time high of $475.00 a share. 16 days later, 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).

On 7 February 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 a fault with eBay earlier that year.

During the dot-com boom, the cable news station CNBC also reported that Yahoo! and eBay were discussing a 50/50 merger. Although the merger never materialized the two companies decided to form a marketing/advertising alliance six years later in 2006.

On 26 June 2000, Yahoo! and Google signed an agreement which would make Google power searches made on yahoo.com.


Post dot-com bubble (2002-2006)
Yahoo! was one of the few surviving large Internet companies after the dot-com bubble burst. Nevertheless, on September 26, 2001, Yahoo! stocks closed at an all-time low of $8.11.

Yahoo! formed partnerships with telecommunications and Internet providers to create content-rich broadband services to compete with AOL. On 3 June 2002, SBC and Yahoo! launched a national co-branded dial service. In July 2003, BT Openworld announced an alliance with Yahoo!On 23 August 2005, Yahoo! and Verizon launched an integrated DSL service.

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

Google then released Gmail, its webmail service offering 1 GB of storage, on 1 April 2004. Yahoo! responded by upgrading the storage of all free Yahoo! Mail accounts from 4 MB to 100 MB, and all Yahoo! Mail Plus accounts to 2 GB. On 9 July 2004, Yahoo! acquired e-mail provider Oddpost to add an Ajax interface to Yahoo! Mail Beta. Google also released Google Talk, a Voice over IP and instant messaging service, on 24 August 2005. On 13 October 2005, Yahoo! and Microsoft announced that Yahoo! Messenger and MSN Messenger would become interoperable.

Yahoo! continued acquiring companies to expand its range of services, particularly Web 2.0 services. Yahoo! Launch became Yahoo! Music on 9 February 2005. On 20 March 2005, Yahoo! purchased photo sharing service Flickr.On 29 March 2005, the company launched its blogging and social networking service Yahoo! 360°.In June 2005, Yahoo! acquired blo.gs, a service based on RSS feed aggregation. Yahoo! then bought online social event calendar Upcoming.org on 4 October 2005. Yahoo! acquired social bookmark site del.icio.us on 9 December 2005 and then playlist sharing community webjay on 9 January 2006.


The future (2007-)
Yahoo! Next is an incubation ground for future Yahoo! technologies currently in their beta testing phase. It contains forums for Yahoo! users to give feedback to assist in the development of these future Yahoo! technologies.

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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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Communication

Yahoo! provides internet communication services such as Yahoo! Mail and Yahoo! Messenger, Yahoo! Mail is the largest e-mail service in the world. Yahoo! also offers social networking services and user-generated content in products such as My Web, Yahoo! Personals, Yahoo! 360º, Yahoo! Photos, and Flickr.

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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.