Yahoo.com

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Company Name

Yahoo! Inc.

Company Contact

phone: (408) 349-3300,Customer Care: 866.562.7219

Website Analysis

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Company

Motto: "The world's most visited web page!"

Slogan: "Do You Yahoo!?"

Yahoo! is a global Internet services company, providing a web portal and platform for a full range of Internet services. Yahoo! was founded by Jerry Yang and David Filo in January of 1994 and the company is headquartered in Sunnyvale, California. The exclamation point is actually part of the trademark name of Yahoo!, Incorporated, to avoid conflict with other companies named Yahoo.

Website

While Yahoo! started out as a simple web directory and search service, it has expanded through many added features over the years to become at least one of the top five web service portals out there. Major services provided include:

Yahoo! mail - A service offering free email accounts.
Yahoo! chat/IM - A network of chat rooms, organized by categories. This service is tied in with Instant Messaging. Users may download a client which will allow them to utilize the IM and chat services.
Yahoo! groups - These are a combination of bulletin boards and mailing lists, which users may both create and join. They are categorized and highly customizable by the users. They may be moderated or have restricted access.
Yahoo! shopping - Includes information on retailers, auctions, travel and a yellow pages.
Yahoo! media - Provides a news service, including weather and sports information.
Yahoo! Geocities - This is the free web space service bought out by Yahoo!. Users may put up free home pages in exchange for allowing ads to run on the page, or may sign up for paid accounts for ad-free pages.
Yahoo! Games - A free games site, where visitors may compete with each other in a variety of board games such as checkers, chess, and go (ancient board game from Asia), or play single-player games.
Yahoo! answers - A section where members can post questions and receive answers for nearly any topic.
A host of other services which are almost too many to post here, but include a photo publishing feature, address books, entertainment guides, a map service, personal ads, job ads, and more. New features and services are being offered all the time as the company explores new opportunities for growth.

A unique feature of Yahoo! is that one may access every service consistently through one Yahoo! ID. By signing up for a Yahoo! ID, one may instantly have access to a home page, email account, and chat/IM account. Furthermore, the services are all integrated with each other, so that mail notifiucations from a Yahoo! group will go to the owner's mail account, email friends may be automatically added to the IM watch list, and so on.

A Yahoo! toolbar may also be downloaded and installed on the web browser. It is available for Internet Explorer and Firefox, and can run on Windows, Mac, and Linux. The additional Instant Messenger program is also a separate stand-alone program available for the same platforms.

History

The original selection of the name "Yahoo" stems from the creatures in the novel Gulliver's Travels; "yahoos" were uncivilized human-like creatures in a land ruled by horses. The literary reference had since lent to the slang term "yahoo", a "rude, unsophisticated, uncouth" person. This was in keeping with the Internet and World Wide Web of 1994; still regarded at the time as a wild frontier just beginning to be explored. However, founders David Filo and Jerry Yang have since half-jokingly declared the name Yahoo to be an acronym, standing for "Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle". Internet historians will note that both the common phase "yet another" and the reference to the Usenet "oracle" newsgroup indicates that the founder's roots go very deep into the beginnings of the computer revolution.

The very first form of Yahoo! was a simple web page called "Jerry's Guide to the World Wide Web" put up in January 1994. It was a simple list of links to other web sites, organized in a directory structure similar to a telephone book. By the end of 1994, the page had received a record one million hits, and the founders realized the potential for a lucrative business had formed. they renamed the company as Yahoo! Incorporated on March 2nd, 1995, and from there proceeded to build their full web portal.

Their chief competitors throughout the end of the 1990s included AOL, Lycos, Excite, AltaVista, and Infoseek. Yahoo! continued to both buy up other web service start-ups and found their own services, including their web search engine. These diversified services included:

The purchase of RocketMail in March 1997, which was folded into Yahoo! Mail.
The purchase of ClassicGames.com also in 1997, which became Yahoo! Games.
The purchase of Yoyodyne Entertainment, Inc., a direct marketing company, in October 1998.
The purchase of web hosting provider GeoCities in January 1999.
The launching of Yahoo! Messenger in July 1999.
The purchase of eGroups in June 2000, which became Yahoo! Groups.

However, the unprecedented and famous dot-com bubble was growing to an inevitable break by the year 2001, and although many Internet companies folded during the collapse of the dot-com bubble in 2001, Yahoo! was among the few large Internet companies to survive with their stock relatively unscathed.

Yahoo! has been well known for being the largest company to base its web portal on the BSD Unix platform. To this day, Yahoo's servers run on the highly secure and stable BSD server platform. The quality of BSD software plus the fact that it is an open source system which is free of cost, has led some hand in Yahoo!'s success.

Today, Yahoo!'s chief competitors are Google and the MSN network. Together, they are often referred to as the "big three" web portal companies.

Culture

Yahoo! has had an advantage of being in the right place and time to ride the wave of the Internet boom; as new home users began to adopt computers and Internet access into their homes, many of them found and stayed with Yahoo! Yahoo! boosted this effect with clever TV advertisements through the late 1990s.

Because of the full range of services provided, a Yahoo! member can enjoy every possible aspect of Internet experience without even once leaving the Yahoo! domain. Thanks to the integration of their social network, there has been a whole generation of Yahoo! users who have met in their chat, dated through their personals, established web sites through their home pages, and depended on Yahoo! for all of their news, recreation, and online shopping needs. There is a tight subculture of users on the Yahoo! network, who would not think of abandoning the site because it's where all of their friends are.

Business Profile

The company's revenue at the close of 2006 was $6.53 billion. They employ 11,700 workers at their company headquarters of Sunnyvale, California. They rank #412 on the Fortune 500.

Like other large web portal and search services, Yahoo!'s chief source of revenue is online advertising. Yahoo! makes 2.5 cents to 3 cents from each search on average.