Yahoo was established byJerry Yang andDavid Filo in January 1994 and was one of the pioneers of the early Internet era in the 1990s.[6] However, its use declined in the 2010s as some of its services were discontinued, and it lost market share toFacebook andGoogle.[7][8]
Etymology
The word "yahoo" is abackronym for "Yet Another Hierarchically Organized Oracle"[9] or "Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle".[10] 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.[11] 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."[12] This meaning derives from theYahoo race of fictional beings fromGulliver's Travels.
Jerry Yang andDavid Filo, the founders of YahooThe Yahoo home page in 1994, when it was a directory. Asearch engine was added in 1995.
In January 1994,Jerry Yang andDavid Filo were electrical engineering graduate students atStanford University, when they created a website named "Jerry and David's guide to the World Wide Web".[13][14][15][16] The site was a human-editedweb 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 theYahoo Directory.[14][17][18][19][20] The "yahoo.com" domain was registered on January 18, 1995.[21]
Yahoo was incorporated on March 2, 1995. In 1995, asearch engine function, called Yahoo Search, was introduced. This allowed users to search Yahoo Directory.[22][23] Yahoo soon became the first popular online directory and search engine on theWorld Wide Web.[24]
Expansion
Map showing localized versions of Yahoo web portals, as of 2023Yahoo sign atTimes Square, 2010
Yahoo grew rapidly throughout the 1990s. Yahoo became apublic company via aninitial public offering in April 1996 and its stock price rose 600% within two years.[25] Like many search engines and web directories, Yahoo added a web portal, putting it in competition with services includingExcite,Lycos, andAmerica Online.[26] By 1998, Yahoo was the most popular starting point for web users,[27] and the human-edited Yahoo Directory the most popular search engine,[19] receiving 95 million page views per day, triple that of rival Excite.[25] It also made many high-profile acquisitions. Yahoo began offering freee-mail from October 1997 after the acquisition ofRocketMail, which was then renamed to Yahoo Mail.[28] In 1998, Yahoo replacedAltaVista as the crawler-based search engine underlying the Directory withInktomi.[29] Yahoo's two biggest acquisitions were made in 1999:Geocities for $3.6 billion[30] andBroadcast.com for $5.7 billion.[31]
Its stock price skyrocketed during thedot-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.[32]
Yahoo began usingGoogle for search in June 2000.[33][34] 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.[35] In response to Google'sGmail, Yahoo began to offer unlimited email storage in 2007. In 2008, the company laid off hundreds of people as it struggled from competition.[36]
In February 2008,Microsoft made an unsolicited bid to acquire Yahoo for $44.6 billion.[37][38] 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.[39][40][41][42]
Carol Bartz, who had no previous experience in Internet advertising, replaced Yang as CEO in January 2009.[43][44] In September 2011, after failing to meet targets, she was fired by chairmanRoy J. Bostock; CFOTim Morse was named as Interim CEO of the company.[45][46]
In April 2012, after the appointment ofScott Thompson as CEO, several key executives resigned, includingchief product officerBlake Irving.[47][48] On April 4, 2012, Yahoo announced 2,000 layoffs,[49] or about 14% of its 14,100 workers by the end of year, expected to save around $375 million annually.[50] 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.[51]
On May 13, 2012, Thompson was fired and was replaced on an interim basis byRoss Levinsohn, recently appointed head of Yahoo's new Media group. Several associates ofThird Point Management, includingDaniel S. Loeb were nominated to theboard of directors.[52][51][53][54] Thompson's total compensation for his 130-day tenure with Yahoo was at least $7.3 million.[55]
On July 15, 2012,Marissa Mayer was appointed president and CEO of Yahoo, effective July 17, 2012.[56][57]
In June 2013, Yahoo acquiredblogging siteTumblr for $1.1 billion in cash, with Tumblr's CEO and founderDavid Karp continuing to run the site.[58][59][60][61] In July 2013, Yahoo announced plans to open an office in San Francisco.[62]
On August 2, 2013, Yahoo acquiredRockmelt; its staff was retained, but all of its existing products were terminated.[63]
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.[64] The data did not count mobile usage, nor Tumblr.[65]
Mayer also hiredKatie 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.[66]
On February 21, 2017, as a result of theYahoo data breaches, Verizon lowered its purchase price for Yahoo by $350 million and reached an agreement to share liabilities regarding the data breaches.[84][85]
On June 13, 2017, Verizon completed the acquisition of Yahoo andMarissa Mayer resigned.[86][87]
Yahoo, AOL, andHuffPost were to continue operating under their own names, under the umbrella of a new company, Oath Inc., later calledVerizon Media.[88][89]
The parts of the original Yahoo! Inc. which were not purchased byVerizon Communications were renamedAltaba, which was later liquidated, making a final distribution in October 2020.[90]
In November 2021, Yahoo announced that it was ending operations in mainland China due to the increasingly challenging business and legal environment.[93] Previously, the company discontinued China Yahoo Mail on August 20, 2013.[94]
In 2023, Yahoo announced that it would cut 20% of its workforce. The move followed mass layoffs from other tech giants includingGoogle,Microsoft,Twitter, Inc,Meta, andAmazon. The company is set to lay off roughly 1,000 staff members of their 8,600 workers.[95]
On September 22, 2016, Yahoo disclosed adata breach that occurred in late 2014, in which information associated with at least 500 million user accounts,[96][97] one of the largest breaches reported to date.[98] The United States indicted four men, including two employees of Russia'sFederal Security Service (FSB), for their involvement in the hack.[99][100] 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.[101] The company stated that hackers had utilized stolen internal software to forgeHTTP cookies.[102][103]
On October 3, 2017, the company stated that all 3 billion of its user accounts were affected by the August 2013 theft.[104][105][106][107][108]
Censorship of private emails affiliated with Occupy Wall Street protests
After some concerns overcensorship of private emails regarding a website affiliated withOccupy Wall Street protests were raised, Yahoo responded with an apology and explained it as an accident.[110][111][112]
Partners and sponsorships
The 2015Dublin LGBTQ Pride Festival, sponsored by Yahoo
On September 11, 2001, Yahoo announced its partnership withFIFA for the2002 FIFA World Cup and2006 FIFA World Cup tournaments. It was one of FIFA's 15 partners at the tournaments. The deal included co-branding the organization's websites.[113]
BuzzFeed acquiredHuffPost from Yahoo in November 2020, in a stock deal with Yahoo as a minority shareholder.[123][124] 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.[125] ThePaley Center for Media collaborated withVerizon Media to exclusively stream programs on Yahoo platforms beginning in 2020.[126]
Yahoo became the main sponsor for thePramac Racing team and the first title sponsor for the 2021 ESport/MotoGP Championship season.[127] Yahoo, the official partner for the September 2021New York Fashion Week event also unveiled sponsorship for theRebecca Minkoff collection via aNFT space.[128] In September 2021, it was announced that Yahoo partnered withShopify, connecting the e-commerce merchants on Yahoo Finance, AOL and elsewhere.[129]
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