Yahoo which is officially spelled with an exclamation mark, is a world famous American company that runs a popular website where people do searches, read the news, check their emails or even use its instant messaging service for communication. You may have used at least one of the products of Yahoo! yourself or at least have seen its name on someone's email address.
Yahoo! has very interesting history. It all began sometime in January 1994 when two Electrical Engineering graduate students at Stanford University, Jerry Yang and David Filo began a project known originally as "Jerry and David's Guide to the World Wide Web". In April of the same year, the project was renamed "Yahoo!". Yahoo was the acronym for "Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle". The original URL for Yahoo! was akebono.stanford.edu/yahoo.
The next year Yahoo! had the domain name that we know today, yahoo.com. Jerry and David incorporated Yahoo! on March 1, 1995. The both appointed as their first . The new company got its funding at first with help of Sequoia Capital who helped to raise almost 3 million dollars and then by by selling 2.6 million shares at thirteen dollars each at their first public offering on April 12, 1996 which raised 33.8 million dollars. With the amount of money raised, Yahoo! was able to operate and expand.
The email portal currently run by Yahoo! is not Yahoo!'s original. Yahoo! Mail was once known as RocketMail which was one the major rivals of Hotmail. It was originally owned by Four11, a communications company. On March 8, 1997, Yahoo! purchased Four11 and as a result of the purchase, RocketMail was renamed Yahoo! Mail. Today, if you try to visit www.rocketmail.com, you will be automatically directed to Yahoo! Mail.
Yahoo! became a victim of a distributed denial of service attack also known as "DDoS" on February 7, 2000 that caused its website to be unavailable for a few hours. On June 26 of the same year, Yahoo! and Google signed an agreement that stated that Yahoo! was to retain Google's search engine as its default search engine for the world wide web.
If you have used the Internet for searching something since the 1990s, you may have heard of Altavista which is also a search engine. Altavista was once a popular search engine until Google came to the picture. Today, Altavista is a part of Yahoo!. The company acquired the search engine in July 2003 when it bought over its orignal owner, Overture, Inc.
Yahoo! later added more features for its users by acquiring more companies that offered them. The services that Yahoo! acquired includes Fickr, a photo sharing service, Konfabulator which is now known as Yahoo! Widget, and Launchcast which became Yahoo! Music.
Works Consulted:
"Why They Are Named So, http://shobhitsharda.wordpress .com/2009/09/30/why-they-are-n amed-so/ (accessed September 1, 2010).
Wikipedia contributors, "AltaVista," Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/w/inde x.php?title=AltaVista&oldid=379689583 (accessed September 1, 2010).
Wikipedia contributors, "Yahoo!," Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/w/inde x.php?title=Yahoo!&oldid=382139657 (accessed September 1, 2010).
Source: www.helium.com
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