Yahoo! was founded in 1994 by Stanford Ph.D. students David Filo and Jerry Yang. Yahoo! is a leading Internet brand globally and the most trafficked Internet destination worldwide. The company is headquartered in Sunnyvale, California.
Although Yahoo! remains an internet portal, it has branched into many services, including search, media content, communication, commerce, business services, and advertising.
Yahoo! Search
Yahoo! foray into search was through a couple strategic acquisitions of the company in 2003, along with the launch of it's own search crawler and natural search results. On December 23, 2002 Yahoo! first announced it would acquire Inktomi Corp. for $235 million dollars. Inktomi is a provider of OEM Web search and paid inclusion services. Completion of the acquisition was announced on March 18, 2003. On July 14 2003, Yahoo! announced an even larger acquisition with the search space, Overture Services, Inc., for $1.63 billion dollars. Overture is a leading provider of commercial search with hundreds of thousand of advertisers. The acquisition was complated in October 2003. Yahoo! began leveraging its search assets in early 2004, using its own crawler to power its natural results listing, and using overture for sponsored results.
Media Content
Yahoo! has partnered with a variety of content providers to provide users with media content in a variety of verticals: sports, games, finance, music, movies, and news.
Communication
Yahoo's primary communication services are Yahoo! Mail and Yahoo! Messenger, but they have been branching out into other communication services. They have their own dating service, Yahoo! Personals, a suite of user generated services called Yahoo! 360, that includes blog services, reviews, and photo sharing. Their photo services include Yahoo! Photo and the popular photo site Flickr.
Commerce
Yahoo's commerce services include Yahoo! shopping, Yahoo! travel, Yahoo! autos, and Yahoo! auctions. Yahoo! shopping is a price comparison engine that aggregates products from many online merchants. Their travel services includes a booking engine powered by Travelociy, as well as travel guides by Rough Travel.
1 of 1 people found this review helpful Kathy Hogan,
Seattle
Yahoo!, Jun 29, 2006
I've had Yahoo! mail for several years now, and have been happy with it for the most part. However recently I've had problems with old sent files being sent again. I've just started using their search engine, and have been just as satisfied with it as Google's. All in all, a good portal.
