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Yahoo is a major American web portal that serves as a central hub for many digital services. A portal acts like a digital gateway, providing users with tools like Yahoo Mail, Yahoo News, and Yahoo Finance in one location.

Yahoo! (4855962154)
Yahoo! (4855962154)

It also operates Yahoo Search, a tool used to find information online. Today, the company is operated by Yahoo! Inc. This company is owned 90% by Apollo Global Management and 10% by Verizon.

Countries on Yahoo
Countries on Yahoo

To understand how Yahoo originally worked, you must look at its structure as a directory. In the early 1990s, the internet was not indexed by automated software like it is now. Instead, Yahoo began as a human-edited web directory. This means people manually organized websites into a hierarchy, which is a system of layers and subcategories.

Yahoo screenshot 1994
Yahoo screenshot 1994

Users would navigate through these layers to find specific topics. In 1995, the company introduced Yahoo Search. This new function allowed users to search directly through the existing directory, making it much faster to find information.

The history of Yahoo began at Stanford University in January 1994. Two electrical engineering graduate students, Jerry Yang and David Filo, created a site called "Jerry and David's guide to the World Wide Web."

Jerry Yang and David Filo
Jerry Yang and David Filo

They renamed the project "Yahoo!" in March 1994. The company was officially incorporated on March 2, 1995, and the yahoo.com domain was registered in January 1995. During the 1990s, the company grew at a massive rate. By 1998, Yahoo was the most popular starting point for web users. Its directory received 95 million page views every single day, which was triple the views of its rival, Excite.

Yahoo's rapid growth was fueled by many large acquisitions. In 1997, it acquired RocketMail and renamed it Yahoo Mail. In 1999, the company spent $3.6 billion to buy GeoCities and $5.7 billion to buy Broadcast.com. These purchases helped Yahoo expand its reach during the dot-com bubble. The company's stock price reached an all-time high of $118.75 per share on January 3, 2000. However, the bubble eventually burst. By September 26, 2001, the stock price had dropped to a low of $8.11 per share.

One of the most famous parts of Yahoo's history involves missed opportunities to buy Google. In 1998, Google's founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, offered to sell their search engine to Yahoo for $1 million. Yahoo declined this offer. Later, in 2002, Yahoo's CEO, Terry Semel, negotiated to buy Google for $3 billion. Google's leadership rejected this amount, and the deal ended. Many business experts consider this one of the largest strategic errors in corporate history. Yahoo also rejected a $47 billion offer to be bought by Microsoft in 2008.

As the 2010s approached, Yahoo faced a significant decline. It lost a large amount of market share to competitors like Facebook and Google. Some of its services were discontinued during this time. The company also faced criticism regarding its business practices. For example, a paid inclusion program launched in 2004 allowed commercial sites to pay for guaranteed listings. This made it difficult for users to distinguish between regular search results and paid advertisements. Additionally, the company faced scrutiny over its cooperation with internet censorship in mainland China. This included legal cases involving journalists like Shi Tao, who was sentenced to prison after using a Yahoo! Mail account.

Despite these challenges, Yahoo remains a part of the modern internet ecosystem. It has moved through many different leadership eras, including the time when Google executive Marissa Mayer served as CEO. The company has also formed major alliances, such as the 2009 agreement with Microsoft. Under this alliance, Yahoo websites began using Microsoft's Bing to provide search results. Today, Yahoo continues to offer localized versions of its portal to users in many different countries around the world.

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🖼️ Images & Media (5)
File:Jerry Yang and David Filo.jpg
Jerry Yang and David Filo.jpg
File:Yahoo screenshot 1994.png
Yahoo screenshot 1994.png
File:Countries on Yahoo.svg
Countries on Yahoo.svg
File:Yahoo! (4855962154).jpg
Yahoo! (4855962154).jpg
File:DUBLIN PRIDE 2015 ( YAHOO! WERE THERE - WERE YOU?)-106289 (19257385102).jpg
DUBLIN PRIDE 2015 ( YAHOO! WERE THERE -...
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