Yahoo (, styled yahoo! in its logo) is an American web portal that provides the search engine Yahoo Search and related services including My Yahoo, Yahoo Mail, Yahoo News, Yahoo Finance, Yahoo Sports, y!entertainment, yahoo!life, and its advertising platform, Yahoo Native. It is operated by the namesake company Yahoo! Inc., which is 90% owned by Apollo Global Management and 10% by Verizon.
Yahoo was established by Jerry Yang and David Filo in January 1994 and was one of the pioneers of the early Internet era in the 1990s. However, its use declined in the 2010s as some of its services were discontinued, and it lost market share to Facebook and Google.
Etymology
The word "yahoo" is a backronym for "Yet Another Hierarchically Organized Oracle" or "Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle". The term "hierarchical" described how the Yahoo database was arranged in layers of subcategories. The term "oracle" was intended to mean "source of truth and wisdom", and the term "officious", rather than being related to the word's normal meaning, described the many office workers who would use the Yahoo database while surfing from work. However, founders Filo and Yang insist they mainly selected the name because they liked the slang definition of a "yahoo" (used by college students in David Filo's native Louisiana in the late 1980s and early 1990s to refer to an unsophisticated, rural Southerner): "rude, unsophisticated, uncouth." This meaning derives from the Yahoo race of fictional beings from Gulliver's Travels.
History
Founding
thumb|[[Jerry Yang and David Filo, the founders of Yahoo]]
thumb|The Yahoo home page in 1994, when it was a directory. A [[search engine was added in 1995.]]
In January 1994, Jerry Yang and David Filo were electrical engineering graduate students at Stanford University, when they created a website named "Jerry and David's guide to the World Wide Web". The site was a human-edited web directory, organized in a hierarchy, as opposed to a searchable index of pages. In March 1994, "Jerry and David's Guide to the World Wide Web" was renamed "Yahoo!" and became known as the Yahoo Directory. The "yahoo.com" domain was registered on January 18, 1995.
Yahoo was incorporated on March 2, 1995. In 1995, a search engine function, called Yahoo Search, was introduced. This allowed users to search Yahoo Directory. Yahoo soon became the first popular online directory and search engine on the World Wide Web.
Expansion and the dot-com bubble
thumb|upright=1.35|Map showing localized versions of Yahoo web portals, as of 2023
thumb|upright|Yahoo sign at [[Times Square, 2010]]
Yahoo grew rapidly throughout the 1990s. Yahoo became a public company via an initial public offering in April 1996 and its stock price rose 600% within two years. Like many search engines and web directories, Yahoo added a web portal, putting it in competition with services including Excite, Lycos, and America Online. By 1998, Yahoo was the most popular starting point for web users, and the human-edited Yahoo Directory the most popular search engine, In 1998, Yahoo replaced AltaVista as the crawler-based search engine underlying the Directory with Inktomi. Yahoo's two biggest acquisitions were made in 1999: Geocities for $3.6 billion and Broadcast.com for $5.7 billion.
Its stock price skyrocketed during the dot-com bubble, closing at an all-time high of $118.75/share on January 3, 2000. However, after the dot-com bubble burst, it reached a post-bubble low of $8.11 on September 26, 2001.
Yahoo began using Google for search in June 2000. Over the next four years, it developed its own search technologies, which it began using in 2004 partly using technology from its $280 million acquisition of Inktomi in 2002. In response to Google's Gmail, Yahoo began to offer unlimited email storage in 2007. In 2008, the company laid off hundreds of people as it struggled from competition.
Yahoo had two failed attempts to acquire Google; in 1998, Larry Page and Sergey Brin approached Yahoo to sell their nascent search engine for $1 million, but Yahoo declined the offer.
In 2002, when Terry Semel entered into negotiations to purchase Google. Google was reportedly seeking a price of $5 billion. After weeks of negotiation, Yahoo's final offer was $3 billion, a figure that Google's leadership rejected, leading them to terminate the deal.
In February 2008, Microsoft made an unsolicited bid to acquire Yahoo for $44.6 billion. Yahoo rejected the bid, claiming that it "substantially undervalues" the company and was not in the interest of its shareholders. Although Microsoft increased its bid to $47 billion, Yahoo insisted on another 10%+ increase to the offer and Microsoft cancelled the offer in May 2008.
Carol Bartz, formerly the CEO of Autodesk, replaced Yang as CEO in January 2009. In September 2011, after failing to meet targets, she was fired by chairman Roy J. Bostock; CFO Tim Morse was named as Interim CEO of the company.
In August 2010, Yahoo! Groups started rolling out a major software change. This change was denounced by a vast majority of users.
On September 29, 2010, Jim Stoneham, Vice President of Yahoo!'s Communities products, announced that based on members feedback, Yahoo! Groups would be rolling back the recent changes.
In April 2012, after the appointment of Scott Thompson as CEO, several key executives resigned, including chief product officer Blake Irving. On April 4, 2012, Yahoo announced 2,000 layoffs, or about 14% of its 14,100 workers by the end of year, expected to save around $375 million annually. In an email sent to employees in April 2012, Thompson reiterated his view that customers should come first at Yahoo. He also completely reorganized the company.
On May 13, 2012, Thompson was fired and was replaced on an interim basis by Ross Levinsohn, recently appointed head of Yahoo's new Media group. Several associates of Third Point Management, including Daniel S. Loeb were nominated to the board of directors. Thompson's total compensation for his 130-day tenure with Yahoo was at least $7.3 million.
On July 15, 2012, Marissa Mayer was appointed president and CEO of Yahoo, effective July 17, 2012.
In June 2013, Yahoo acquired blogging site Tumblr for $1.1 billion in cash, with Tumblr's CEO and founder David Karp continuing to run the site. In July 2013, Yahoo announced plans to open an office in San Francisco.
On August 2, 2013, Yahoo acquired Rockmelt; its staff was retained, but all of its existing products were terminated.
Data collated by comScore during July 2013 revealed that, during the month, more people in the U.S. visited Yahoo websites than Google; the first time that Yahoo outperformed Google since 2011. The data did not count mobile usage, nor Tumblr.
Mayer also hired Katie Couric to be the anchor of a new online news operation and started an online food magazine. However, by January 2014, doubts about Mayer's progress emerged when Mayer fired her own first major hire, Henrique de Castro.
On December 12, 2014, Yahoo acquired video advertising provider BrightRoll for $583 million.
On November 21, 2014, Yahoo acquired Cooliris.
In August 2023, it was announced Yahoo had acquired the San Francisco-headquartered social investing platform, Commonstock.
In April 2024, it was announced Yahoo had acquired the AI-driven news aggregator app, Artifact.
Decline, security breaches, and sale
In March 2004, Yahoo! launched a paid inclusion program whereby commercial websites were guaranteed listings on the Yahoo! search engine after payment. This scheme was lucrative but proved unpopular both with website marketers (who were reluctant to pay), and the public (who were unhappy about the paid-for listings being indistinguishable from other search results). As of October 2006, Paid Inclusion ceased to guarantee any commercial listing and only helped the paid inclusion customers, by crawling their site more often and by providing some statistics on the searches that led to the page and some additional smart links (provided by customers as feeds) below the actual URL.
By December 2015, Mayer was criticized as performance declined. Mayer was ranked as the least likable CEO in tech.
On May 20, 2013, Flickr, Yahoo!'s image and video hosting website, unveiled a redesigned layout and additional features, including one terabyte of free storage for all users, seamless photostream, cover photo and updated Android App. The redesigned layout fills the page with dynamically re-sized photos and, on the home page, displays recent comments on photos. Tech Radar described the new style Flickr as representing a "sea change" in its purpose. Many users criticized the changes, and the site's help forum received thousands of negative comments.
In January 2014, a large scale malware attack was discovered by Fox IT in the Netherlands that was targeted at Java and dated back to December 30, 2013, especially affecting users in Romania, France, and the UK and being delivered to 300,000 Yahoo! users per hour when they discovered it. Yahoo! was criticized for not providing any public guidance on the number of users affected or advice on what the affected users should do.
In October 2016, Scott Ard, a prominent editorial director fired from Yahoo in 2015, filed a lawsuit accusing Mayer of leading a sexist campaign to purge male employees. Ard, a male employee, stated "Mayer encouraged and fostered the use of [an employee performance-rating system] to accommodate management's subjective biases and personal opinions, to the detriment of Yahoo's male employees". In the suit, Ard claimed that, prior to his firing, he had received "fully satisfactory" performance reviews since starting at the company in 2011 as head of editorial programming for Yahoo's home page, yet he was relieved of his role that was given to a woman who had been recently hired by Megan Lieberman, the editor-in-chief of Yahoo News. The lawsuit states: