Yahoo! Inc. (NASDAQ: YHOO) is an American public corporation and global Internet services company. It provides a range of products and services including a web portal, a search engine, the Yahoo! Directory, Yahoo! Mail, news, and posting. It was founded by Stanford University graduate students Jerry Yang and David Filo in January of 1994 and incorporated on March 2, 1995. The company is headquartered in Sunnyvale, California.
According to Web traffic analysis companies (including Alexa Internet and Netcraft), Yahoo! has been one of the most visited Web site on the Internet[1], [2], with more than 412 million unique users.

History and growth
In January 1994, Stanford graduate students Jerry Yang and David Filo created a website named "Jerry's Guide to the World Wide Web". Jerry's Guide to the World Wide Web was a directory of other web sites, organized in a hierarchy, as opposed to a searchable index of pages.
In April 1994, "Jerry's Guide to the World Wide Web" was renamed "Yahoo!". Filo and Yang said they selected the name because they liked the word's general definition, as in Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift: "rude, unsophisticated, uncouth." The name can also be a backronym for "Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle". However, the exclamation mark is often omitted when referring to Yahoo.

Early history (1994-1996)
Like many search engines and web directories, Yahoo diversified into a Web portal. In the late 1990s, Yahoo, MSN, Lycos, Excite and other Web portals were growing rapidly. Web portal providers rushed to acquire companies to expand their range of services, in the hope of increasing the time a user stays at the portal.
On 8 March 1997, Yahoo acquired online communications company Four11. Four11's webmail service, Rocketmail, became Yahoo! Mail. Yahoo also acquired ClassicGames.com and turned it into Yahoo! Games. Yahoo then acquired direct marketing company Yoyodyne Entertainment, Inc. on 12 October 1998. On 28 January 1999, Yahoo acquired web hosting provider GeoCities. Another company Yahoo acquired was eGroups, which became Yahoo! Groups after the acquisition on 28 June 2000. Yahoo also launched Yahoo! Messenger on 21 July 1999.
When acquiring companies, Yahoo often changed the relevant terms of service. For example, they claimed intellectual property rights for content on their servers, unlike the companies they acquired. As a result, many of the acquisitions were controversial and unpopular with users of the existing services.

Growth (1997-1999)
On 3 January 2000, at the height of the Dot-com boom, Yahoo stocks closed at an all-time high of $475.00 a share. 16 days later, shares in Yahoo Japan became the first stocks in Japanese history to trade at over ¥100,000,000, reaching a price of 101.4 million yen ($962,140 at that time).

Dot-com bubble (2000-2001)
Yahoo was one of the few surviving large Internet companies after the dot-com bubble burst. Nevertheless, on September 26, 2001, Yahoo stocks closed at an all-time low of $8.11.
Yahoo formed partnerships with telecommunications and Internet providers to create content-rich broadband services to compete with AOL. On 3 June 2002, SBC and Yahoo launched a national co-branded dial service. In June 2005, Yahoo acquired blo.gs, a service based on RSS feed aggregation. Yahoo then bought online social event calendar Upcoming.org on 4 October 2005. Yahoo acquired social bookmark site del.icio.us on 9 December 2005 and then playlist sharing community webjay on 9 January 2006.

Post dot-com bubble (2002-2006)
Yahoo! Next is an incubation ground for future Yahoo technologies currently in their beta testing phase. It contains forums for Yahoo users to give feedback to assist in the development of these future Yahoo technologies.

The future (2007- )

Main article: List of Yahoo!-owned sites and services Products and services
Yahoo! Search is the second largest search engine on the internet, Yahoo also provides vertical search services such as Yahoo! Image, Yahoo! Video, Yahoo! Local, Yahoo! News, and Yahoo! Shopping Search.

Search
Yahoo provides internet communication services such as Yahoo! Mail and Yahoo! Messenger, Yahoo Mail is the largest e-mail service in the world with almost half the market share.
Yahoo also offers social networking services and user-generated content in products such as My Web, Yahoo! Personals, Yahoo! 360°, and Flickr.

Communication
Yahoo partners with hundreds of premier content providers in products such as Yahoo! Sports, Yahoo! Finance, Yahoo! Music, Yahoo Movies, Yahoo News, and Yahoo! Games to provide media contents and news. Yahoo also provides a personalization service My Yahoo, which enables users to collect their favorite Yahoo features, content feeds, and information into a single page.
Yahoo has developed partnerships with different broadband providers such as AT&T(via BellSouth & SBC), Verizon Communications, Rogers Communications and British Telecom, offering a range of free and premium Yahoo content and services to subscribers.

Content
Yahoo! Mobile includes services for on-the-go messaging, such as email, instant messaging, and moblogging; information, such as search and alerts; and fun and games, including ringtones, mobile games, and Yahoo Photos for camera phones.

OneSearch
Yahoo offers commerce services such as Yahoo! Shopping, Yahoo Autos, Yahoo Real Estate and Yahoo Travel, which enables users to gather relevant information and make commercial transactions and purchases online.

Commerce
Yahoo provides services such as Yahoo Domains, Yahoo Web Hosting, Yahoo Merchant Solutions, Yahoo Business Email, and Yahoo Store to small business owners and professionals allowing them to build their own online stores using Yahoo's tools.
Yahoo also offers HotJobs to help recruiters find the talent they seek.

Small Business
Yahoo! Search Marketing provides services such as Sponsored Search, Local Advertising, and Product/Travel/Directory Submit that let different businesses advertise their products and services in the Yahoo network. Yahoo! Publisher Network is an advertising tool for online publishers to place advertisements relevant to their content to monetize their websites.

Advertising
About 88% of total revenues for the fiscal year 2006 came from marketing services. [3] The largest segment of it comes from search advertising, where advertisers bid for search terms to display their ads on the search results, on average Yahoo makes 2.5 cents to 3 cents from each search. With the new search advertising system "Panama" Yahoo aims to increase revenue generated from search.
Other forms of advertising which bring in revenue for Yahoo include display and contextual advertising.

Revenue model

January 1994: Jerry Yang and David Filo create "Jerry's Guide to the World Wide Web" while studying at Stanford University.
April 1994: "Jerry's Guide to the World Wide Web" is renamed "Yahoo"
March 1995: Yahoo is incorporated.
1995: Ziff Davis Inc. launches the magazine Yahoo! Internet Life, initially as ZD Internet Life. The magazine was meant to accompany and complement the web site.
April 12, 1996: Yahoo has Initial public offering, closing at $33.00, up 270% from the IPO price, after peaking at $43.00 for the day.
June 8, 1998: Yahoo acquires Viaweb, co-founded by Paul Graham, which becomes Yahoo Store.
October 12, 1998: Yahoo acquires direct marketing company Yoyodyne Entertainment, Inc.
June 28, 2007 Yahoo! UK/Ireland online auctions closes, Yahoo! referring instead to eBay. Important events/Timeline

Criticism and controversy
In March 2004, Yahoo launched a paid inclusion program whereby commercial websites are guaranteed listings on the Yahoo search engine after payment. As of Oct 2006, Paid Inclusion doesn't guarantee any commercial listing, it only helps 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.

Yahoo paid inclusion controversy
This section has been tagged since July 2007.
Yahoo has also been criticized for funding spyware and adware — advertising from Yahoo's clients often appears on-screen in pop-ups generated from adware that a user may have installed on their computer without realizing it by accepting online offers to download software to fix computer clocks or improve computer security, add browser enhancements, etc. Similarly, Yahoo has received adverse comment for bundling their Yahoo toolbar with other software (Macromedia Flash 8 is an example) with installation being the default setting. The toolbar itself has been noted as taking up a lot of screen-space when installed. Also, Windows users will find themselves unable to uninstall the toolbar by normal means on Internet Explorer.

Adware and Spyware
Yahoo, along with Google China, Microsoft, Cisco, AOL, Skype, Nortel and others, has cooperated with the Chinese government in implementing a system of internet censorship in mainland China.
Unlike Google or Microsoft, which keep confidential records of its users outside mainland China, Yahoo! stated that the company will not protect the privacy and confidentiality of its Chinese customers from the authorities..

Work in China
In April 2005, Shi Tao, a journalist working for a Chinese newspaper, was sentenced to 10 years in prison by the Changsha Intermediate People's Court of Hunan Province, China (First trial case no 29), for "providing state secrets to foreign entities". The "secret", as Shi Tao's family claimed, refers to a brief list of censorship orders he sent from a Yahoo Mail account to the Asia Democracy Forum before the anniversary of the Tiananmen Square Incident.
Yahoo contends it must respect the laws of governments in jurisdictions where it is operating.

Chinese dissident imprisonment controversy
Wang Xiaoning is a Chinese dissident from Shenyang who was arrested by authorities of the People's Republic of China for publishing controversial material online.
In 2000 and 2001, Wang, who was an engineer by profession, posted electronic journals in a Yahoo group calling for democratic reform and an end to single-party rule. He was arrested in September 2002 after Yahoo assisted Chinese authorities by providing information. In September 2003, Wang was convicted of charges of "incitement to subvert state power" and sentenced to ten years in prison.

Sued in US court for outing Chinese dissident
As a result of media scrutiny relating to Internet child predators and a lack of significant ad revenues, Yahoo's "user created" chatrooms were closed down in June 2005. due to the trolling phenomenon.

Image search

List of search engines
List of acquisitions by Yahoo!
Yahoo! Answers
Yahoo! Fantasy Sports
Yahoo! Sports
Yahoo! Finance
GYM (technology) - Google/Yahoo/Microsoft
YMSG - Yahoo! Messenger Protocol