When less is more
and more is bore....

With normal reading speed averaging 230 wpm, 3 MINUTES is the most that you will ever need to read any Dummipedia article.

About	WordPress	Forum	Biography	Newest Articles	Suggest an Article	Contact

Yahoo!

Jump to: navigation, search

“Yahoo” redirects here. For other uses, see Yahoo (disambiguation).

Fast Facts
Yahoo! Inc.
Type	Public (NASDAQ: YHOO)
Founded	Santa Clara, California (March 1, 1995)
Headquarters	701 First Avenue Sunnyvale, California, United States
Key people	Jerry Yang, CEO, Chief Yahoo and Co-founder David Filo, Chief Yahoo and Co-founder Susan Decker, President
Industry	Internet, computer software
Products	(See list of Yahoo! products)
Revenue	US$6.7 billion (2007)
Operating income	US$730 million (2007)
Employees	13,600 (October 18, 2007)
Home page	www.yahoo.com

Screenshot of the Yahoo! main page on April 26, 2007

Yahoo! Inc. (NASDAQ: YHOO) is an American public corporation and global Internet services company. Headquartered in Sunnyvale, California, it has one of the most visited websites on the Internet, with more than 130 million unique users per month.

2. Yahoo! started off as an online list of web pages, published by Jerry Yang and David Filo in January 1994 as a way of keeping track of their personal interests on the Internet. Published as a website named "Jerry's Guide to the World Wide Web", the list grew so large that it necessitated the creation of categories and subcategories, organized in a hierarchy. Two months later, Yang and Filo renamed their website as "Yahoo", its official expansion being "Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle". By the end of 1994, Yahoo! had already received one million hits. Yang and Filo realized that their website had massive business potential and on March 1, 1995, Yahoo! was incorporated. As the name "Yahoo" had already been trademarked by EBSCO Industries for their barbecue sauce and knives, Yang and Filo added an exclamation mark to the name in order to get the trademark.

3. In April 1996, Yahoo! became a public company, raising US$33.8 million by selling 2.6 million shares at US$13 each. Like many other search engines and web directories, it also diversified into a Web portal. In the late 1990s, Yahoo! began to aggressively acquire companies to expand its range of services in order to compete with MSN, Lycos, Excite and other web portals that were then growing rapidly. About 88% of Yahoo!'s total revenues for the fiscal year 2006 came from marketing services. The largest segment of it comes from Yahoo! Search Marketing, where advertisers bid for search terms to display their advertisements on the search results. Yahoo! has been criticized for funding spyware and adware, generated from its partnership with advertising distributor Walnut Ventures, which had a direct partnership with Direct Revenue. Advertising from Yahoo!'s clients often appears onscreen in pop-ups, generated from adware that a user had unwittingly installed on their computer, e.g. by accepting online offers.

4. In January 2008, Yahoo! announced that it was laying off 7% of its workforce of 14,300 as the company had suffered severely in its inability to compete effectively with industry search leader, Google. Subsequently, Microsoft made an unsolicited bid to purchase Yahoo! for US$31 a share, amounting to US$44.6 billion, on February 1.^[1] However, it withdrew its offer on May 3, after Yahoo! rejected its increased offer of US$33 per share and insisted on US$37.^[2] Calling Yahoo!'s approach to the offer irrational, billionaire investor Carl Icahn launched a proxy fight to replace the current board of directors and was appointed to an expanded board on July 21, together with two two allies. Subsequently on November 17, Yahoo! announced that Jerry Yang would be stepping down as CEO.^[3] more... at Chronology