Yahoo (, styled yahoo''!'' in its

logo A logo (abbreviation of logotype; ) is a graphic mark, emblem, or symbol used to aid and promote public identification and recognition. It may be of an abstract or figurative design or include the text of the name that it represents, as in ...

) is an American

web portal A web portal is a specially designed website that brings information from diverse sources, like emails, online forums and search engines, together in a uniform way. Usually, each information source gets its dedicated area on the page for displayin ...

that provides the search engine

Yahoo Search Yahoo! Search is a search engine owned and operated by Yahoo!, using Microsoft Bing to power results. Originally, "Yahoo! Search" referred to a Yahoo!-provided interface that sent Web search query, queries to a searchable index of pages supple ...

and related services including My Yahoo,

Yahoo Mail ! Mail (also written as Yahoo Mail) is an email service offered by the American company Yahoo, Inc. The service is free for personal use, with an optional monthly fee for additional features. Business email was previously available with the Yah ...

Yahoo News Yahoo News (stylized as Yahoo! News) is a news website that originated as an internet-based news aggregator by Yahoo. The site was created by Yahoo software engineer Brad Clawsie in August 1996. Articles originally came from news services such ...

, Yahoo Finance,

Yahoo Sports Yahoo! Sports is a sports news website launched by Yahoo! on December 8, 1997. It receives a majority of its information from Stats Perform. It employs numerous writers, and has team pages for teams in almost every North American major sport. ...

, y!entertainment, yahoo!life, and its advertising platform,

Yahoo Native Yahoo! Native (formerly known as Yahoo! Advertising, Yahoo! Search Marketing and Yahoo! Gemini) is a native "Pay per click" Internet advertising service provided by Yahoo!, Yahoo. Yahoo began offering this service after acquiring Overture Servic ...

. It is operated by the namesake company Yahoo! Inc., which is 90% owned by

Apollo Global Management Apollo Global Management, Inc. is an American asset management firm that primarily invests in alternative assets. , the company had $548 billion of assets under management, including $392 billion invested in credit, including mezzanine capita ...

and 10% by

Verizon Verizon Communications Inc. ( ), is an American telecommunications company headquartered in New York City. It is the world's second-largest telecommunications company by revenue and its mobile network is the largest wireless carrier in the ...

. 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 Facebook is a social media and social networking service owned by the American technology conglomerate Meta Platforms, Meta. Created in 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg with four other Harvard College students and roommates, Eduardo Saverin, Andre ...

and

Google Google LLC (, ) is an American multinational corporation and technology company focusing on online advertising, search engine technology, cloud computing, computer software, quantum computing, e-commerce, consumer electronics, and artificial ...

Etymology

The word "yahoo" is a

backronym A backronym is an acronym formed from an already existing word by expanding its letters into the words of a phrase. Backronyms may be invented with either serious or humorous intent, or they may be a type of false etymology or folk etymology. The ...

for "

Yet Another A naming convention as a form of computer humour especially among playful programmers, yet another is often abbreviated ya, Ya, or YA in the prefix of an acronym or backronym. This humorous prefix is an idiomatic qualifier in the name of a compu ...

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 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, an ...

race of fictional beings from ''

Gulliver's Travels ''Gulliver's Travels'', originally titled ''Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World. In Four Parts. By Lemuel Gulliver, First a Surgeon, and then a Captain of Several Ships'', is a 1726 prose satire by the Anglo-Irish writer and clerg ...

''.

History

Founding

In January 1994, Jerry Yang and David Filo were electrical engineering graduate students at

Stanford University Leland Stanford Junior University, commonly referred to as Stanford University, is a Private university, private research university in Stanford, California, United States. It was founded in 1885 by railroad magnate Leland Stanford (the eighth ...

, when they created a website named "Jerry and David's guide to the World Wide Web". The site was a human-edited

web directory A web directory or link directory is an online list or catalog of websites. That is, it is a directory on the World Wide Web of (all or part of) the World Wide Web. Historically, directories typically listed entries on people or businesses, and the ...

, 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 Directory — Once The Internet's Most Important Search Engine — Is To Close
September 26, 2014, retrieved on June 3, 2017 The "yahoo.com" domain was registered on January 18, 1995. Yahoo was incorporated on March 2, 1995. In 1995, a

search engine A search engine is a software system that provides hyperlinks to web pages, and other relevant information on World Wide Web, the Web in response to a user's web query, query. The user enters a query in a web browser or a mobile app, and the sea ...

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 The World Wide Web (WWW or simply the Web) is an information system that enables Content (media), content sharing over the Internet through user-friendly ways meant to appeal to users beyond Information technology, IT specialists and hobbyis ...

Expansion

Yahoo grew rapidly throughout the 1990s. Yahoo became a

public company A public company is a company whose ownership is organized via shares of share capital, stock which are intended to be freely traded on a stock exchange or in over-the-counter (finance), over-the-counter markets. A public (publicly traded) co ...

via an

initial public offering An initial public offering (IPO) or stock launch is a public offering in which shares of a company are sold to institutional investors and usually also to retail (individual) investors. An IPO is typically underwritten by one or more investm ...

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 Lycos, Inc. (stylized as LYCOS), is a web search engine and web portal established in 1994, spun out of Carnegie Mellon University. Lycos also encompasses a network of email, web hosting, social networking, and entertainment websites. The company ...

, and

America Online AOL (formerly a company known as AOL Inc. and originally known as America Online) is an American web portal and online service provider based in New York City, and a brand marketed by Yahoo! Inc. (2017–present), Yahoo! Inc. The service tra ...

. By 1998, Yahoo was the most popular starting point for web users, and the human-edited Yahoo Directory the most popular search engine, receiving 95 million page views per day, triple that of rival Excite. It also made many high-profile acquisitions. Yahoo began offering free

e-mail Electronic mail (usually shortened to email; alternatively hyphenated e-mail) is a method of transmitting and receiving Digital media, digital messages using electronics, electronic devices over a computer network. It was conceived in the ...

from October 1997 after the acquisition of RocketMail, which was then renamed to Yahoo Mail. In 1998, Yahoo replaced

AltaVista AltaVista was a web search engine established in 1995. It became one of the most-used early search engines, but lost ground to Google and was purchased by Yahoo! in 2003, which retained the brand, but based all AltaVista searches on its own sear ...

as the crawler-based search engine underlying the Directory with

Inktomi Inktomi Corporation was an American Internet service provider (ISP) software developer based in Foster City, California. Customers included Microsoft, HotBot, Amazon.com, eBay, and Walmart. The company developed Traffic Server, a proxy se ...

. Yahoo's two biggest acquisitions were made in 1999:

Geocities GeoCities, later Yahoo! GeoCities, was a web hosting service that allowed users to create and publish websites for free and to browse user-created websites by their theme or interest, active from 1994 to 2009. GeoCities was started in November 1 ...

for $3.6 billion and Broadcast.com for $5.7 billion. Its stock price skyrocketed during the

dot-com bubble The dot-com bubble (or dot-com boom) was a stock market bubble that ballooned during the late-1990s and peaked on Friday, March 10, 2000. This period of market growth coincided with the widespread adoption of the World Wide Web and the Interne ...

, 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

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 Gmail is the email service provided by Google. it had 1.5 billion active user (computing), users worldwide, making it the largest email service in the world. It also provides a webmail interface, accessible through a web browser, and is also ...

, Yahoo began to offer unlimited email storage in 2007. In 2008, the company laid off hundreds of people as it struggled from competition. In February 2008,

Microsoft Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational corporation and technology company, technology conglomerate headquartered in Redmond, Washington. Founded in 1975, the company became influential in the History of personal computers#The ear ...

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, who had no previous experience in Internet advertising, 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 April 2012, after the appointment of Scott Thompson as CEO, several key executives resigned, including

chief product officer A chief product officer (CPO), sometimes known as head of product or VP of product, is a corporate title referring to an executive responsible for various product-related activities in an organization. The CPO is to the business's product what th ...

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 A board of directors is a governing body that supervises the activities of a business, a nonprofit organization, or a government agency. The powers, duties, and responsibilities of a board of directors are determined by government regulatio ...

. Thompson's total compensation for his 130-day tenure with Yahoo was at least $7.3 million. On July 15, 2012,

Marissa Mayer Marissa Ann Mayer (; born May 30, 1975) is an American business executive and investor who served as President (corporate title), president and chief executive officer of Yahoo! from 2012 to 2017, when it was sold to Verizon. She was a long-tim ...

was appointed president and CEO of Yahoo, effective July 17, 2012. In June 2013, Yahoo acquired

blog A blog (a Clipping (morphology), truncation of "weblog") is an informational website consisting of discrete, often informal diary-style text entries also known as posts. Posts are typically displayed in Reverse chronology, reverse chronologic ...

ging site

Tumblr Tumblr (pronounced "tumbler") is a microblogging and Social networking service, social networking website founded by David Karp in 2007 and is owned by American company Automattic. The service allows users to post multimedia and other content ...

for $1.1 billion in cash, with Tumblr's CEO and founder

David Karp David Karp (born July 6, 1986) is an American businessperson, best known as the founder and former CEO of the microblogging platform Tumblr. Karp began his career, without receiving a high school diploma, as an intern under Fred Seibert at th ...

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 San Francisco, officially the City and County of San Francisco, is a commercial, Financial District, San Francisco, financial, and Culture of San Francisco, cultural center of Northern California. With a population of 827,526 residents as of ...

-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

By December 2015, Mayer was criticized as performance declined. Mayer was ranked as the least likable CEO in tech. On February 2, 2016, Mayer announced layoffs amounting to 15% of the Yahoo workforce. On July 25, 2016,

Verizon Communications Verizon Communications Inc. ( ), is an American telecommunications company headquartered in New York City. It is the world's second-largest telecommunications company by revenue and its mobile network is the largest wireless carrier in the ...

announced the acquisition of Yahoo's core Internet business for $4.83 billion. The deal excluded Yahoo's 15% stake in

Alibaba Group Alibaba Group Holding Limited, branded as Alibaba (), is a Chinese Multinational corporation, multinational technology company specializing in E-commerce in China, e-commerce, retail, Internet, and technology. Founded on 28 June 1999 in Hangzho ...

and 35.5% stake in Yahoo Japan. On February 21, 2017, as a result of the Yahoo data breaches, Verizon lowered its purchase price for Yahoo by $350 million and reached an agreement to share liabilities regarding the data breaches. On June 13, 2017, Verizon completed the acquisition of Yahoo and

resigned. Yahoo, AOL, and

HuffPost ''HuffPost'' (''The Huffington Post'' until 2017, itself often abbreviated as ''HPo'') is an American progressive news website, with localized and international editions. The site offers news, satire, blogs, and original content, and covers p ...

were to continue operating under their own names, under the umbrella of a new company, Oath Inc., later called

Verizon Media Verizon Communications Inc. ( ), is an American telecommunications company headquartered in New York City. It is the world's second-largest telecommunications company by revenue and its mobile network is the largest wireless carrier in the ...

. The parts of the original Yahoo! Inc. which were not purchased by

were renamed Altaba, which was later liquidated, making a final distribution in October 2020. In September 2021,

investment fund An investment fund is a way of investment, investing money alongside other investors in order to benefit from the inherent advantages of working as part of a group such as reducing the risks of the investment by a significant percentage. These ad ...

s managed by

acquired 90% of Yahoo. In November 2021, Yahoo announced that it was ending operations in mainland China due to the increasingly challenging business and legal environment. Previously, the company discontinued China Yahoo Mail on August 20, 2013. In 2023, Yahoo announced that it would cut 20% of its workforce. The move followed mass layoffs from other tech giants including

Twitter, Inc Twitter, Inc. was an American social media company based in San Francisco, California, which operated and was named for its flagship social media network prior to its rebrand as X. In addition to Twitter, the company previously operated the V ...

, Meta, and

Amazon Amazon most often refers to: * Amazon River, in South America * Amazon rainforest, a rainforest covering most of the Amazon basin * Amazon (company), an American multinational technology company * Amazons, a tribe of female warriors in Greek myth ...

. The company is set to lay off roughly 1,000 staff members of their 8,600 workers.

Products and services

For a list of all current and defunct services offered by Yahoo, see

List of Yahoo-owned sites and services Yahoo!, once one of the most popular web sites in the United States, is as of September 2021 a content sub-division of the namesake company Yahoo (2017–present), Yahoo Inc., owned by Apollo Global Management (90%) and Verizon Communications (10%) ...

Data breaches

On September 22, 2016, Yahoo disclosed a

data breach A data breach, also known as data leakage, is "the unauthorized exposure, disclosure, or loss of personal information". Attackers have a variety of motives, from financial gain to political activism, political repression, and espionage. There ...

that occurred in late 2014, in which information associated with at least 500 million user accounts, one of the largest breaches reported to date. The United States indicted four men, including two employees of Russia's

Federal Security Service The Federal Security Service of the Russian Federation �СБ, ФСБ России (FSB) is the principal security agency of Russia and the main successor agency to the Soviet Union's KGB; its immediate predecessor was the Federal Counterin ...

(FSB), for their involvement in the hack. On December 14, 2016, the company revealed that another separate data breach had occurred in 2014, with hackers obtaining sensitive account information, including security questions, to at least one billion accounts. The company stated that hackers had utilized stolen internal software to forge

HTTP cookie HTTP cookie (also called web cookie, Internet cookie, browser cookie, or simply cookie) is a small block of data (computing), data created by a web server while a user (computing), user is browsing a website and placed on the user's computer o ...

s. On October 3, 2017, the company stated that all 3 billion of its user accounts were affected by the August 2013 theft.

Criticism

DMCA notice to whistleblower

On November 30, 2009, Yahoo was criticized by the

Electronic Frontier Foundation The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) is an American international non-profit digital rights group based in San Francisco, California. It was founded in 1990 to promote Internet civil liberties. It provides funds for legal defense in court, ...

for sending a

DMCA The Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) is a 1998 United States copyright law that implements two 1996 treaties of the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO). It criminalizes production and dissemination of technology, devices, or ...

notice to

whistleblower Whistleblowing (also whistle-blowing or whistle blowing) is the activity of a person, often an employee, revealing information about activity within a private or public organization that is deemed illegal, immoral, illicit, unsafe, unethical or ...

website " Cryptome" for publicly posting details, prices, and procedures on obtaining

private information Privacy (, ) is the ability of an individual or group to seclude themselves or information about themselves, and thereby express themselves selectively. The domain of privacy partially overlaps with security, which can include the concepts of a ...

pertaining to Yahoo's subscribers.

Censorship of private emails affiliated with Occupy Wall Street protests

After some concerns over

censorship Censorship is the suppression of speech, public communication, or other information. This may be done on the basis that such material is considered objectionable, harmful, sensitive, or "inconvenient". Censorship can be conducted by governmen ...

of private emails regarding a website affiliated with

Occupy Wall Street Occupy Wall Street (OWS) was a left-wing populist movement against economic inequality, capitalism, corporate greed, big finance, and the influence of money in politics that began in Zuccotti Park, located in New York City's Financial ...

protests were raised, Yahoo responded with an apology and explained it as an accident.

Partners and sponsorships

On September 11, 2001, Yahoo announced its partnership with

FIFA The Fédération Internationale de Football Association (), more commonly known by its acronym FIFA ( ), is the international self-regulatory governing body of association football, beach soccer, and futsal. It was founded on 21 May 1904 to o ...

for the

2002 FIFA World Cup The 2002 FIFA World Cup, also branded as Korea/Japan 2002, was the 17th FIFA World Cup, the quadrennial Association football, football world championship for List of men's national association football teams, men's national teams organized by ...

and

2006 FIFA World Cup The 2006 FIFA World Cup was the 18th FIFA World Cup, the quadrennial international Association football, football world championship tournament. It was held from 9 June to 9 July 2006 in Germany, which had won the right to FIFA World Cup hosts ...

tournaments. It was one of FIFA's 15 partners at the tournaments. The deal included co-branding the organization's websites. Yahoo sponsored the 2012 Sundance Film Festival. NBC Sports Group aligned with Yahoo Sports the same year with content and program offerings on mobile and desktop platforms. Yahoo announced television video partnerships in 2013 with

Condé Nast Condé Nast () is a global mass media company founded in 1909 by Condé Nast (businessman), Condé Montrose Nast (1873–1942) and owned by Advance Publications. Its headquarters are located at One World Trade Center in the FiDi, Financial Dis ...

, WWE,

ABC NEWS ABC News most commonly refers to: * ABC News (Australia), a national news service of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation * ABC News (United States), a news-gathering and broadcasting division of the American Broadcasting Company ABC News may a ...

, and

CNBC CNBC is an American List of business news channels, business news channel owned by the NBCUniversal News Group, a unit of Comcast's NBCUniversal. The network broadcasts live business news and analysis programming during the morning, Day ...

. Yahoo entered into a 10-year collaboration in 2014, as a founding partner of Levi's Stadium, home of the

San Francisco 49ers The San Francisco 49ers (also written as the San Francisco Forty-Niners and nicknamed the Niners) are a professional American football team based in the San Francisco Bay Area. The 49ers compete in the National Football League (NFL) as a member ...

. The

National Basketball Association The National Basketball Association (NBA) is a professional basketball league in North America composed of 30 teams (29 in the United States and 1 in Canada). The NBA is one of the major professional sports leagues in the United States and Ca ...

partnered with Yahoo Sports to stream games, offer virtual and augmented-reality fan experiences, and in 2018

NBA League Pass NBA League Pass is the National Basketball Association's direct-to-consumer subscription-based product that provides live and on-demand NBA games. It is available to those in the United States and also as an international package for all other co ...

. Yahoo Sportsbook launched in November 2019, a collaboration with BetMGM.

BuzzFeed BuzzFeed, Inc. is an American Internet mass media, media, news and entertainment company with a focus on digital media. Based in New York City, BuzzFeed was founded in 2006 by Jonah Peretti and John Seward Johnson III, John S. Johnson III to ...

acquired

from Yahoo in November 2020, in a stock deal with Yahoo as a minority shareholder. The NFL partnered with Yahoo in 2020, to introduce a new "Watch Together" function on the Yahoo Sports app for interactive co-viewing through a synchronized livestream of local and primetime NFL games. The Paley Center for Media collaborated with

to exclusively stream programs on Yahoo platforms beginning in 2020. Yahoo became the main sponsor for the Pramac Racing team and the first title sponsor for the 2021 ESport/MotoGP Championship season. Yahoo, the official partner for the September 2021

New York Fashion Week New York Fashion Week (NYFW), held in February and September of each year, is a semi-annual series of events in Manhattan typically spanning seven to nine days when international Fashion design, fashion collections are shown to buyers, the pres ...

event also unveiled sponsorship for the Rebecca Minkoff collection via a NFT space. In September 2021, it was announced that Yahoo partnered with

Shopify Shopify Inc., stylized as ''shopify'', headquartered in Ottawa, Ontario, operates an e-commerce platform for retail point-of-sale systems that offers payments, marketing, shipping, inventory management, transaction management, and customer eng ...

, connecting the e-commerce merchants on Yahoo Finance, AOL and elsewhere.

References

External links

*
Yahoo products and services

ALTABA and Yahoo EDGAR filing history
{{Authority control 1994 establishments in California 2017 mergers and acquisitions Companies based in Sunnyvale, California Companies formerly listed on the Nasdaq Companies in the PRISM network Internet properties established in 1994 Multinational companies headquartered in the United States Software companies based in California Software companies of the United States Technology companies based in the San Francisco Bay Area Technology companies established in 1994 Telecommunications companies established in 1994