According to Alexa Internet and Netcraft, both of which are Web trends companies, Yahoo! is the most visited website on the Internet today. The global network of Yahoo! websites received 3.4 billion page views per day on average as of October 2005.
Screenshot of Yahoo's homepage November 13th, 2004
Yahoo! headquarters in Sunnyvale
Security checkpoint at entrance to headquarters parking lot.
Yahoo! started out as "Jerry's Guide to the World Wide Web" but eventually received a new moniker with the help of a dictionary. "Yet AnotherHierarchical Officious Oracle" is a backronym for "yahoo!", but Filo and Yang insist they selected the name because they liked the word's general definition, as in Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift: "rude, unsophisticated, uncouth."[1] (For this reason the word "Yahoo!" should be pronounced with the emphasis on the first syllable.) Yahoo! itself first resided on Yang's studentworkstation, "Akebono," while the software was lodged on Filo's computer, "Konishiki"—both named after legendary sumo wrestlers. The "yet another" phrasing goes back at least to the Unix utility yacc, whose name is an acronym for "yet another compiler compiler".
As Yahoo's popularity has increased, so has the range of features it offers, making it a kind of one-stop shop for all the popular activities of the Internet. These now include: Yahoo! Mail, a Web-based e-mail service, an instant messaging client, a very popular mailing list service (Yahoo! Groups), online gaming and chat, various news and information portals, online shopping and auction facilities. Many of these are based at least in part on previously independent services, which Yahoo has acquired - such as the popular GeoCities free Web-hosting service, Rocketmail, and various competing mailing list providers such as eGroups. Many of these take-overs were controversial and unpopular with users of the existing services, as Yahoo! often changed the relevant terms of service. An example of this would be their claiming intellectual property rights for the content on their servers, which the original companies had not done.
At the pinnacle of the Internet boom in the year 2000, the cable news station CNBC reported that Yahoo! Inc. and eBay were in discussions to initiate a 50/50 merger [2].
Beginning in late 2002, Yahoo! began to bolster its search services by acquiring relevant companies. In December 2002, Yahoo! acquired Inktomi, and in July 2003, it acquired Overture Services, Inc. and its subsidiaries AltaVista and AlltheWeb. On February 18, 2004, Yahoo! dropped Google-powered results and returned to using its own technology to provide search results.
As of 2005 Yahoo!'s news message boards have gained something of a cult following. Attached to every story is a discussion board, yet rarely are the posts pertinent to the story. Often, the posts are deliberately outrageous, attempting to provoke angry responses which, in turn, lead to more offensive posts and so on. No news story, however sacrosanct, is spared.
In June 2005 Yahoo! acquired blo.gs, a service based on RSS feed aggregation, primarily from weblogs (hence the name), which produces a simple list (and also an RSS feed thereof) of freshly updated Weblogs, ordered according to recentness of update. blo.gs was the first Internet company hosted on a domain hack Yahoo! acquired, del.icio.us being the second.
Criticism and controversy
The Yahoo! Holdings controversy
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". He had passed details of a censorship order to the AsiaDemocracy Forum and the website Democracy News. Reporters Without Borders (RSF) investigated the case, specifically the ease with which Mr Shi had been caught. He had sent the message through an anonymous Yahoo! account. But police had gone straight to his offices and picked him up. RSF later obtained a translation of the verdict which stated that Mr Shi's account information, telephone number and address were "furnished by Yahoo! Holdings".
Criticism of Yahoo! intensified when Reporters Without Borders claimed translated court documents proved the company aided Chinese authorities in the case of dissident Li Zhi. In December 2003 Li Zhi was sentenced to 8 years imprisonment for "inciting subversion".
Mail certification
In February2006, Yahoo! also announced their decision (along with AOL) to give users the option to "certify" outgoing mail. That is, by paying up to one cent for each outgoing mail, allowing the mail in question to avoid spam filters. This decision is opposed by people that claim it to be a "tax on speech", which would eventually restrict freedom of speech as companies implementing similar decision would be tempted to increase the amount of mail classified as spam in order to encourage users to pay, preventing non-profit organizations to freely communicate with their members, among other things. However a large number of non-profit organisations, such as the Red Cross have signed up to the program.
Yahoo! Mail user name bans
In February 20, 2006, it was revealed that Yahoo! Mail is banning the word "allah" in e-mail user names, both separate and as part of a user name such as linda.callahan. [4] Surprisingly, other religiously loaded words such as "jesus", "mohammad", and even "satan" isn't, and neither are many other offensive words. [5] Since Yahoo! is giving the impression they are selectively banning this particular word for "God" frequently used by Arabs among muslims, christians, and jews, along with "osama" among few other banned words, they have been raising voices about generalizing Arabs to be terrorists [6]. Shortly after the news of the "allah" ban became widespread in media, it was lifted in February 23, 2006. Along with this action, Yahoo! also spoke up on this issue:
"We continuously evaluate abuse patterns in registration usernames to help prevent spam, fraud and other inappropriate behavior. A small number of people registered for IDs using specific terms with the sole purpose of promoting hate, and then used those IDs to post content that was harmful or threatening to others, thus violating Yahoo!'s Terms of Service.
'Allah' was one word being used for these purposes, with instances tied to defamatory language. We took steps to help protect our users by prohibiting use of the term in Yahoo! usernames. We recently re-evaluated the term 'Allah' and users can now register for IDs with this word because it is no longer a significant target for abuse. We regularly evaluate this type of activity and will continue to make adjustments to our registration process to help foster a positive customer experience."
Chatrooms and message boards
Due to fears of preying on underage children, the Yahoo! chatrooms were closed down in 2005. However, Yahoo!'s messsage boards were not, as they are notorious for open trolling, flaming, racism, and general rudeness. The message boards lack any form of moderators, only a complaint form which has dubious functions.
January 19, 2000: At the height of the Dot-com tech bubble, 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). [7]
February 7, 2000: Yahoo.com was brought to a halt for a few hours as it was the victim of a distributed denial of service attack (DDoS). [8][9]. On the next day, its shares rose about $16, or 4.5 percent as the failure was blamed on hackers rather than on an internal glitch, unlike a fault with eBay earlier that year.
January 19, 2004: Yahoo! Inc. announces the formation of Yahoo! Research Labs, a research organization focusing on the invention of new technologies and solutions for Yahoo!. Yahoo's Head and Principal Scientist, Dr. Gary William Flake, leads the new organization. Dr. Flake has since left the company and now works at Microsoft.
February 19, 2004: Yahoo! dropped Google-powered results, returning to its own algorithm and index after it had used Google's results for a long time.
March 1, 2004: Yahoo! announces (as cited in the New York Times article listed in the "References" section) that it will practice paid inclusion for its search service. However, it also announced it would continue to rely mainly on a free web crawl for most of its search engine content.
March 2, 2005 Yahoo! completes 10 years of corporate existence. Gives out free ice cream coupons at Baskin Robbins to its users to celebrate its "birthday."
November 15, 2005 The sports section of My Yahoo! is hacked; titles such as "selfhood + conscience" and "aesthetic freedom" link to various pages at doublereflection.org .
December 1, 2005 - Tivo and Yahoo! form a partnership where several Yahoo! features can be viewed on television via the Series2 TiVO setop box. [18], [19]
Yahoo! Next is essentially incubation ground for future Yahoo! technologies in their beta testing phase. A chance for the Yahoo! community to interact and have a say, on how upcoming products are designed and fine tuned. Each prototype can be discussed in its own individual Yahoo! Next forum.
Yahoo! News – news updates and top stories at Yahoo! News, including world, national, business, entertainment, sports, weather, technology, and weird news. – http://news.yahoo.com/
