Yahoo! Inc. (NASDAQ: YHOO) is an American
multinational internet corporation headquartered in Sunnyvale,
California, United States.
The company is perhaps best known for its web portal, search engine
(Yahoo! Search), Yahoo! Directory, Yahoo! Mail, Yahoo! News, Yahoo!
Groups, Yahoo! Answers, advertising, online mapping, video sharing, and
social media website and services. It is one of the largest websites in
the United States.
Yahoo! Inc. was founded by Jerry Yang and David Filo
in January 1994 and was incorporated on March 1, 1995. On January 13, 2009, Yahoo!
appointed Carol Bartz, former executive chairman of Autodesk, as its new
chief executive officer and a member of the board of directors.On
September 6, 2011, Bartz was removed from her position at Yahoo! by
chairman Roy Bostock and CFO Tim Morse was named as Interim CEO of the
company.On January 4, 2012, Scott Thompson, former President of PayPal,
was named the new chief executive officer.
According to news sources roughly 700 million people
visit Yahoo websites every month.Yahoo! itself claims it attracts
"more than half a billion consumers every month in more than 30
languages".
·History and growth
In January 1994, Jerry Yang and David Filo were
electrical engineering graduate students at Stanford University when they
created a website named "David and Jerry's Guide to the World Wide
Web".[10] David and Jerry's Guide to the World Wide Web was a
directory of other websites, organized in a hierarchy, as opposed to a
searchable index of pages. In April 1994, "David and Jerry's Guide to
the World Wide Web" was renamed "Yahoo!".The yahoo.com
domain was created on January 18, 1995.The word is an acronym for
"Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle."The term
"hierarchical" described how the Yahoo! database was arranged in
directory layers. The term "oracle" was intended to mean
"source of truth and wisdom," and "officious", rather
than being related in any way to the meaning of the word, described the
many office workers who would use the Yahoo! database while surfing from
work.However, 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." Filo's college girlfriend often referred
to Filo as a "yahoo." This meaning derives from the name of a
race of fictional beings from Gulliver's Travels.
Yahoo! grew rapidly throughout the 1990s. Like many
search engines and web directories, Yahoo! diversified into a web portal.
It also made many high-profile acquisitions. Its stock price skyrocketed
during the dot-com bubble, Yahoo! stocks closing at an all-time high of
$118.75 a share on 3 January 2000.
However, after the dot-com bubble burst, it settled at a post-bubble low
of $4.05 on 26 September 2001.
In 2000, Yahoo! began using Google for search
results. Over the next four years, it developed its own search
technologies, which it began using in 2004. Yahoo! also revamped its mail
service to compete with Google's Gmail in 2007. The company struggled
through 2008, with several large layoffs.
In February 2008, Microsoft Corporation made an
unsolicited bid to acquire Yahoo! for USD $44.6 billion. Yahoo!
subsequently formally rejected the bid, claiming that it
"substantially undervalues" Yahoo! and was not in the interest
of its shareholders. Three years later, Yahoo! had a stock market
capitalization of USD $22.24 billion.Carol Bartz replaced cofounder Jerry
Yang in January 2009.In September 2011 she was removed from her position
at Yahoo! by the company's chairman Roy Bostock, and CFO Tim Morse was
named as Interim CEO of the company.