History Of Yahoo

Jerry Yang and David Filo, Stanford electrical engineering grads, started Yahoo! in January 1994 with "Jerry and David's Guide to the World Wide Web". Instead of an index, the Guide was a hierarchical directory of websites. Jerry and David's Guide to the Web became "Yahoo" in April 1994.

The acronym "YAHOO" derives from "Yet Another Hierarchically Organized Oracle" or "Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle."The yahoo.com domain was founded January 18, 1995.

Yahoo! expanded into a web portal and made several high-profile acquisitions during 1990–1999. The dot-com boom drove the company's stock price to an all-time high of US$118.75 in 2000.

It hit an all-time low of $8.11 in 2001 when the dot-com boom broke. Yahoo! officially rejected Microsoft's 2008 purchase attempt.Yahoo cut off 2,000 workers (14% of their staff) in early 2012. The biggest Yahoo! layoff ever.

The board of directors removed Carol Bartz in September 2011 after she succeeded co-founder Yang as CEO in January 2009. Tim Morse became acting CEO when Bartz left.After Scott Thompson left as PayPal's CEO in January 2012, Ross Levinsohn became temporary CEO on May 13, 2012. Former Google executive Marissa Mayer became CEO on July 16.

After Yahoo disclosed security problems in 2017, Mayer resigned as CEO when Verizon bought Yahoo for $4.48 billion.Yahoo CEO Guru Gowrappan served from 2018 until 2021.Jim Lanzone became Yahoo CEO in September 2021.

When Jerry and David's Guide to the World Wide Web was renamed Yahoo! in 1994, Yang and Filo said "Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle" was a good backronym, but they insisted they chose it because they liked the word's general definition in Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels: "rude, unsophisticated, uncouth." The URL was akebono.stanford.edu/~yahoo.

By 1994's end, Yahoo! had one million visits before its January 1995 domain creation. On March 2, 1995, Yang and Filo established Yahoo! after realizing their website had huge financial potential.Yang and Filo asked entrepreneur Randy Adams for a venture capital firm referral and Adam recommended Michael Moritz.

Michael Moritz of Sequoia finance raised $3 million in two rounds of venture finance for Yahoo! on April 5, 1995.Yahoo!'s IPO on April 12, 1996, raised $33.8 million by selling 2.6 million shares at $13 apiece.

"Yahoo" was trademarked for barbecue sauce, knives, and human-powered watercraft by EBSCO Industries and Old Town Canoe Co. Yang and Filo added the exclamation mark to the name to trademark it.Unfortunately, Yahoo! is commonly referred to without an exclamation point. Stanford University graduate Srinija Srinivasan was recruited as Yahoo!'s fifth employee as "Ontological Yahoo!" to help Yang and Filo organize online material.

The late 1990s saw Yahoo!, MSN, Lycos, Excite, and other online portals rise fast. Web portals acquired firms to extend their offerings and keep users longer.

Yahoo! bought Four11 on March 8, 1997. Rocketmail, Four11's webmail, became Yahoo! Mail. The firm bought and renamed ClassicGames.com Yahoo! Games. On October 12, 1998, Yahoo! bought direct marketing business Yoyodyne Entertainment, Inc.

Yahoo! bought GeoCities in January 1999. In June 2000, Yahoo! purchased eGroups-now Yahoo! Groups. It bought Pager, which became Yahoo! Messenger a year later.

Yahoo! routinely modified terms of service when acquiring firms. Instead of the acquired firms' rules, they claimed intellectual property rights for server content. Therefore, many acquisitions were contentious and unpopular with current service consumers.

Last month of 1999, Yahoo! stock quadrupled.Yahoo! stock peaked at $118.75 on January 3, 2000, during the dot-com boom. Sixteen days later, Yahoo! Japan shares became the first Japanese stock to trade above ¥100,000,000, achieving 101.4 million yen ($962,140).

Yahoo.com went down for many hours on February 7, 2000, due to a DDoS assault.After the loss was blamed on hackers rather than an internal malfunction, its shares gained $16, or 4.5 percent, unlike eBay's earlier that year.

CNBC claimed that Yahoo! and eBay were negotiating a 50/50 merger during the dot-com boom.The two corporations formed a marketing/advertising agreement in 2006 six years after the merger failed.

Yahoo! and Google inked a deal on June 26, 2000, to power Yahoo.com searches using Google.Yahoo was one of the first to establish a BizOps team in 2000.

Few corporations survived the dot-com bubble bust, including Yahoo! Yahoo! shares hit an all-time low of $8.11 on September 26, 2001.

To compete with AOL, Yahoo! partnered with telecom and Internet providers to provide content-rich broadband services. National co-branded dialup service from SBC and Yahoo! started on June 3, 2002.In July 2003, BT Openworld partnered with Yahoo!

Yahoo! and Verizon released integrated DSL on August 23, 2005.Yahoo! acquired several search engines in late 2002 to improve its offerings. In December 2002, Yahoo! bought Inktomi. Yahoo purchased Konfabulator in February 2005 and renamed it Yahoo! Widgets.Overture Services, Inc. and AltaVista and AlltheWeb were bought by a desktop application in July 2003. Yahoo! switched from Google-powered to its own search results on February 18, 2004.

In March 2004, Yahoo! announced a paid inclusion scheme that guaranteed business websites search engine placement.This profitable technique was controversial with website advertisers (who were unwilling to pay) and the public (who were concerned about the paid-for listings being indistinguishable from other search results).

Paid Inclusion stopped guaranteeing commercial listings in October 2006 and only helped paid inclusion customers by crawling their site more often, providing search statistics, and posting smart links (provided by customers as feeds) below the url.

After Google's Gmail introduction in 2004, Yahoo! increased the storage of all free Yahoo! Mail accounts from 4 MB to 1 GB and all Mail Plus accounts to 2 GB. Yahoo! Mail Beta added Ajax after acquiring Oddpost on July 9, 2004.On August 24, 2005, Google launched Google Talk, Yahoo Messenger, and Yahoo message boards. Yahoo! and Microsoft announced MSN Messenger interoperability on October 13, 2005. Yahoo! eliminated storage meters from Yahoo Mail in 2007, giving limitless storage.

Yahoo! acquired more startups to boost its Web 2.0 offerings. Yahoo! Launch became Yahoo! Music in February 2005. Yahoo! bought Flickr on March 20, 2005.The business introduced Yahoo! 360° blogging and social networking that month. Yahoo! bought RSS feed aggregator blo.gs in June 2005. October 2005 saw Yahoo! buy Upcoming.org, a social event calendar. Yahoo! bought del.icio.us in December 2005 and webjay in January 2009.

Like Google Labs, Yahoo! Next incubated future Yahoo! technologies in beta testing. Yahoo! users might provide input in forums to help build future technologies.

Yahoo! provided beta testing of a redesigned homepage in early 2006. Only Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox were supported in the test. Opera users have condemned Yahoo! for this change. Yahoo! plans to support more browsers.

Yahoo! Mail was updated on August 27, 2007. Yahoo! Messenger integration (which included Windows Live Messenger owing to the networks' federation) and free text messages (not necessarily free to the recipient) were extended to U.S., Canadian, Indian, and Philippine mobile phones.

Yahoo! let off 1,000 workers on January 29, 2008, after failing to compete with Google in search. The 14,300-person corporation lost 7% of its workers.

Yahoo! bought Cambridge, Massachusetts-based Maven Networks, a provider of online video players and advertising solutions, for $160 million in February 2008.

Jerry Yang resigned as Yahoo! CEO on November 17, 2008.Yahoo! laid off 1,520 workers worldwide on December 10, 2008, owing to the global economic slump.