What's Yahoo ?

What's Yahoo! ?

Yahoo! Inc. is an American global Internet services company. It operates an Internet portal and provides a full range of products and services including a search engine, the Yahoo! Directory and Yahoo! Mail. It was founded by Stanford 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 the most visited website on the Internet, with more than 412 million unique users. The global network of Yahoo! websites received 3.4 billion page views per day on average as of October 2005, making it one of the most visited U.S. websites.

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". Its URL was akebono.stanford.edu/yahoo.

By the end of 1994, Yahoo had already received one million hits. Yang and Filo realized their website had massive business potential, and on 2 March 1995, Yahoo was incorporated. On 12 April 1996, Yahoo had its initial public offering, raising $33.8 million dollars, by selling 2.6 million shares at $13 each.

"Yahoo" had already been trademarked for barbecue sauce, knives (by EBSCO Industries) and human propelled watercraft (by Old Town Canoe Co.). Therefore, in order to get the trademark, Yang and Filo added the exclamation mark to the name. However, the exclamation mark is often omitted when referring to Yahoo.

Yahoo's revenue comes from online advertising. 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 Yahoo aims to increase revenue generated from search.Other forms of advertising which bring in revenue for Yahoo include display and contextual advertising

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yahoo!