Tagline: Do you Yahoo!?
In its own way, a legendary Internet company that owns one of the largest search engines. In addition to search services, Yahoo! provides users with various services, such as e-mail, weather forecasts, stock reports and the like.
It all started with the fact that two graduate students at Stanford University began to create a catalog of Internet pages. It was in 1994, the Internet was no longer a curiosity, but everything was just beginning. Works like those started by Jerry Yang and his buddy David Filo have never been done. Initially, the catalog compiled by them had a cumbersome title Jerry and David's Guide to the World Wide Web ("David and Jerry's Guide to the World Wide Web"). It is strange, but despite the obvious obviousness and simplicity of the idea, no one had guessed to compose such a “description” of the Internet before them. Not surprisingly, the traffic of the "Guide" began to grow at a very rapid pace. Realizing that they had attacked a gold mine, the friends decided to put the matter on a professional basis and registered the company Yahoo!. The exclamation mark at the end did not appear by chance - the fact is that by that time there was already a registered TM with the name "Yahoo". Not wanting to abandon the chosen name, the founders simply turned it into an exclamation. It should be noted that it only benefited from this.
word origin yahoo covered in legends. If you believe the words of the creators themselves, they borrowed this word from Gulliver's Travels - so in the last part, called "Journey to the Country of the Houyhnhnms", disgusting subhumans were called (in Russian translation - "yahu"). There is also a playful opinion on the Web, the opinion that yahoo - derivative of expressions "Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle" ("Another hierarchical unofficial prophet") or "You Always Have Other Options" ("You always have another option"). Be that as it may, but the name of the office was given a successful and memorable one.
Initially, the official website of the company (read the catalog) was located at (does not work now), but on January 18, 1995, the domain used to this day was acquired.
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| Yahoo! in December 1996 |
From the very first days, the company faced serious profits. From a simple guide Yahoo! quickly turns into a large portal with many services. Quickly realizing that additional features can not only make old visitors spend more time on their site, but also attract a new audience, the company's management begins to buy up various Internet projects on the basis of which new features were built. Yes, as a basis Yahoo! Mail lay down the now forgotten free mail service RocketMail. Based on company developments Yoyodyne Entertainment Inc. messenger appeared Yahoo! Messenger. In general, throughout its history, Yahoo! absorbed a lot of third-party projects. Some of them have sunk into oblivion, others continue to develop under new leadership to this day. There are many examples. The company developed at an accelerated pace. Until the so-called “dot-com crash” came.
Many burned out then, very many. But a huge margin of safety allowed Yahoo! persevere and keep growing. However, not at such a rapid pace as at the end of the twentieth century. But still, the company survived the crisis, which many of its competitors failed to do - AltaVista, Webring, Lycos, WebCrawler (once the author's favorite search engine) and other very famous projects in their time. Moreover, others did not fall without the help of Yahoo! itself, which absorbed them.
But the threat did not come from veterans. Yahoo! was relegated to the background at the beginning of the 21st century by a much younger company - the era of Google. The new and very aggressive company has not only pushed out competitors, it has essentially become a single standard on the Web. Yahoo! was quickly relegated to the background with a maximum lag.
Then the omnipresent and powerful Microsoft. Talk about what the software giant is "about" to take over Yahoo! were conducted for several years and managed to get bored with all journalists writing news. But the latter did not agree with the proposed cost (about 46 billion US dollars). As a result, the deal never took place and Jerry Yang was forced to leave the post of head of the company. According to popular belief, it was he who did everything so that his offspring was not absorbed Microsoftwho wanted to become #1 on the Internet. However, given the company's near-coma state, pulling out of the deal may not be the best decision. Shareholders were not too happy.
The company continues to develop. New projects appear, interesting and not very solutions are put into action. So, in April 2010, about the beginning of cooperation with Yahoo! the company said Samsung - now some mobile phone models will be supplied with pre-installed applications that provide work with portal services. Well, everything like that. However, the future Yahoo! still too hazy.
The company's headquarters is located in Sunnyvale, California, USA (Sunnyvale, CA, USA). Its services, translated into many languages of the world, are used by hundreds of millions of users. But in general, the portal has the greatest impact in its home country.
