Full Form of YAHOO:
Yet Another Hierarchy of Officious Oracle
YAHOO Full Form is Yet Another Hierarchy of Officious Oracle. It is a search engine cum internet portal that includes various applications like Yahoo! Mail, Yahoo! Answers, Yahoo! Directory, Yahoo! Groups, etc. The Internet is a powerful tool in the current age that has the capacity to do things that were once imagined to be unimaginable.
It is this extraordinary power that makes the Internet even more bewitching. Take for example, when you have to look for a word or certain information, all you need to do is type a few words and get millions of results within seconds. Imagine the amount of time saved. For the purpose of this article, we shall discuss something of this sort. It is one of the most popular search engines in the world, with a very catchy word.
Yahoo! is not just about excitement. It has dimensions that you must explore in order to fully explore one of the early competitors of the now most popular search engine in the world, Google. Before we move to various aspects of Yahoo! we shall have an introductory segment on this search engine, which shall be followed by other segments on this search engine. So let us begin with a brief introduction on Yahoooooo!
Introduction to Yahoo!
Yahoo Inc., which is often referred to in its stylized form Yahoo! is an international technology company that is based in California, USA. The company is widely recognized for its search engine, a web engine, and other related facilities such as Yahoo Mail!, Yahoo! Finance, Yahoo! Answers, Yahoo! Directory, Yahoo! Groups, Online Mapping, advertisements, and others. It is the widely used websites in the USA.
The company has been ranked at high slots in SimilarWeb and Alexa, which mention Yahoo! as the most read news and media portal, with about 7 billion viewers accessing it every month. As of the month June in the year 2015, the website is the fourth largest visited website in the world. Many sources state that Yahoo! attracts about 700 million users per month and Yahoo! Categorically claims that it draws more than a billion users every month from 30 different languages.
The company was established in January 1995, with founders being David Filo and Jerry Yang. It was officially incorporated in the March 1995. In the year 2015, the company made a major announcement to spin off its stakes in famous Alibaba Group in a distinctly listed company. However, later in the same year, the company retracted its decision and decided to spin off its most preferred internet business to a distinct company.
Now that we have discussed the introductory aspects of one of the most visited websites in the world, Yahoo!, it is the time we moved to other aspects of the same. The first segment following the introductory segment would be the foundational and developmental history of the company. The segment shall explore how the company came into existence and what followed afterward. The segment will follow by other segments such as Yahoo! services, Privacy issues, Criticism received throughout its existence, and other related matters.
Foundation and developmental history of Yahoo!
The foundation history will give an insight as to how this multinational company came into being. So, let us begin. It all started in the year 1994, when students from electrical engineering department from the Stanford University namely, Jerry Yang and David Filo, developed a website by the name “Jerry and David’s Guide to the WWW (expanded as World Wide Web). Basically, the website was created as a directory of many other websites, which were structured in a hierarchy. Later in that year, the website was renamed as the now Yahoo!.
The word Yahoo has an interesting reasoning. It is actually the backronym for the terminology“Yet Another Hierarchically Organized Oracle”. It explains the systematic structuring of the websites in the directory. The term “oracle” used in the meaning refers to origin of wisdom and truth. The founders, however, state that they used Yahoo because they loved it as slang. Hence, the name. Stories say that Filo’s girlfriend would often refer him as Yahoo.
Soon after the foundation, the website became a major hit in the internet world. Soon, the website put in a web portal. Ultimately in the year 1998, the web portal became extremely popular among users. In the year 2000, Yahoo started using the search engine giant Google for the purposes of making searches. With the time, it started indulging in the development of its search technologies, which were effectuated in the year 2004. As Google started rising to fame with its Gmail service, Yahoo! came up with unlimited storage service in the year 2007.
In the year 2008, the company faced a series of layoffs. In the year 2008, the software giant Microsoft Corporation attempted to purchase Yahoo! but the latter refused to accept the bid, stating that it undermines the value of the company on the whole. In the following year, Jerry Yang was replaced by Carol Bartz, who herself was eventually removed from her position by Roy Bostock, the Chairman. Tim Morse, the then CFO, was made the interim CEO of Yahoo.
In the year 2012, Scott Thompson was appointed as the new CEO of the company but his appointment witnessed some of the worst layoff incidents. There were massive cuts in employees in that year on the ground of financial constraints. Marissa Mayer as the CEO and the President later replaced him in the same year.
In the year 2013, Yahoo! entered into a breakthrough agreement, resulting in the purchase of the widely popular blogging website, Tumblr, with its founder and the CEO David Karp remaining as a major shareholder. The purchase is stated to make positive effects on Yahoo! as it places the company in the same line as that of other multinational corporations such as Facebook, Google, which themselves are acquiring small companies to connect with a larger proportion of online communities.
In the same year, Yahoo Inc made an announcement that it would acquire RockMelt, a social Web browser. With the acquisition, the CEO of the latter company would become a part of Yahoo!. In order to boost up its search results, Yahoo! entered into partnership with Yelp, Inc. In the same year, it announced that it would acquire BrightRoll, a video advertisement company. This acquisition would make Yahoo!’s video platform the biggest in the United States of America. It also announced that it would acquire Cooliris.
Communication services offered by Yahoo!
Starting from this segment, we shall discuss various services that Yahoo! provides. The first such service would be Communication service that it provides in varied forms and on different platforms. So, let us start our discussion with a brief mention of those platforms operated by Yahoo!
Yahoo! Messenger is probably the most popular feature of Yahoo! services. It is one of the widely used messengers in the world, which offers messaging, video calling and international chat services to its registered users. Another service popularly used for communication purposes is the Yahoo Mail. In order to compete with the fast-growing Gmail, the company announced that the e-mail service would provide unlimited storage service since the year 2007.
Apart from the aforementioned services, we have My Web, Yahoo Personals, Delicious, Yahoo 360, Flickr, and yahoo Buzz. The company, however, closed down its operations on MyBlog Log and Yahoo Buzz. In the year 2011, Yahoo! made an announcement declaring that Yahoo 360 service would be discontinued.
Content related services of Yahoo!
Under this segment, we shall discuss various services that allow content contribution and reading to users. Yahoo provides various such services such as Yahoo Finance, Yahoo Sports, Yahoo Movies, Yahoo! Answers, Yahoo Games, Yahoo Music, and others. Of all of them, Yahoo! Answers is the most popularly used service.
There is a personalization facility that Yahoo provides, which comes by the name My Yahoo. This service allows users to customize Yahoo features in whatever manner they desire. In the year 2008, the company came up with a website called Shine, which enables women to seek advice in between the ages 25 to 54.
Advertisement services of Yahoo.
To any online enterprise, advertisements would make a major source of revenue and thus, Yahoo is no exception. The Yahoo! Search Marketing facilities services such as Local advertising, Sponsored Search, Directory, that allows enterprises to show advertisements about their services and products with the help of Yahoo network. In the year 2010, the Yahoo Publisher Network was relaunched as a tool of advertisement that enabled online publishers to monetize their sites with the help of relevant advertisements.
In the year 2007, Yahoo had launched Panama, which is an Internet advertisement sales system. This online facility allows advertisements to bid for search terms to promote their ads on the results page of the search engine. The system takes into account bids, quality of the advertisements, rates per click, and other relevant factors. This is one of the ways Yahoo earns most of its profit. APT from Yahoo, which was previously known as AMP from Yahoo was announced. It is an online management program that causes unification of the buyer and seller market.
Defunct Services of Yahoo
Yahoo started off as a major hit, however, with time it could not continue with most of its services and products, particularly because of its plummeting financial resources. Under this segment, we shall discuss some of those now defunct services of Yahoo.
The first service for our discussion is Geocities, which was founded in the year 1995. It is regarded as one of the pioneering services that provided web pages to the public. Once upon a time, it had become so popular that it became the most browsed website on WWW (nothing but World Wide Web).
In the year 1999, the website was purchased by Yahoo, however, ten years later the service was shut down. Then we have Yahoo Go—which was a phone application functioning on Java—that was closed down in the year 2010. The once famous Yahoo 360 service became defunct in the year 2007. It was a popular blogging service that was launched in the year 2005.
However, the service was closed within four years of its launch. Yahoo Mash Beta is yet another website that was eventually closed down. Yahoo tech, which was providing product information & other related services, was closed down in the year 2010, about four years after its launch.
Another service by the name Yahoo Koprol was a geo-tagging facility based in Indonesia. It was a very useful facility from yahoo wherein users can share information about various locations with the help of GPS devices. The service was shut down in the year 2012 because of the lack of revenue generation.
Yahoo Mail Classic was also closed down in the year 2013, along with other previous versions of Yahoo Mail. Additionally, other services such as Yahoo Deals, Yahoo Kids, Upcoming, Yahoo SMS Alerts and Messenger feature Phone (abbreviated as J2ME) were shut down in the same year.
Privacy issues with Yahoo
There have been many controversies that brought Yahoo to bad light. One such controversy falls into issues relating to privacy. In the year 2013, an Indian Daily The Indian Express has published that Yahoo had received about 29000 requests seeking information about its users from governments and most of these requests came from the United States of America.
In the same year, The Washington Post published that the United States National Security Agency tapped communications among Yahoo data centers, as a part of its MUSCULAR program. In the year 2014, the company reported that it has been witnessing multiple attempts to hack into millions of accounts of Yahoo users. This made Yahoo caution its users and urge them to change their passwords.
Criticism
In the year 2000, a lawsuit was filed against Yahoo in France that sought prevention of sale of Nazi memorabilia to French people. Yahoo has been criticized for allowing ads through the Yahoo Ad Network to those companies that display the ads with the help of spyware. Yahoo has also been accused of helping Chinese authorities to apprehend Li Zhi and Jiang Lijun, the dissidents. There have been other issues relating to its chat rooms, which were eventually closed down in the year 2005.
For Further Reading:
https://in.yahoo.com/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yahoo!