Yahoo: A Brief History of Yahoo! What You Need to Know

In January of 1994, two graduate students at Stanford University, Jerry Yang and David Filo created what we know today as Yahoo Originally named Jerrys Guide to the World Wide Web, Yahoo was a directory that organized other web sites into a hierarchy. The history of Yahoo begins.

Unlike other search engines, Yahoo gained swift popularity. Just twelve months after its creation, Yang and Filo had over one million hits on their year old search engine. The sheer volume of people using it prompted Filo and Yang to incorporate Yahoo early in 1995

The name Yahoo however, was already taken by other enterprises; Filo and Yang were forced to add the exclamation mark in order to trademark it. Yahoo went public on April 12 1996 were it earned a total of 2.6 million dollars.

With its growing popularity, Yahoo started buying out companies such as eGroups and GeoCities. However, most of the buy outs produced a great deal of controversy since Yahoo had a reputation of changing terms of services when they bought a company

As the history of Yahoo unfolds and Yahoo's phenomenal climb to success, Yahoo creators and shareholders were confident that they had themselves a goldmine that would enjoy a great deal of business success. They didnt predict the burst of the internet bubble in the early two thousands. Yahoo survived the crisis but the value of Yahoo stocks dropped to $8.11, an all time low.

To help rebuild itself, Yahoo formed partnerships with telecommunication companies and internet providers, these alliances led to the creation of content rich broadband services that actively competed with AOL.

Yahoo uses a combination of web crawlers compiled and indexed results to rank the websites that are registered on their search engine. In March of 2004 Yahoo launched a paid inclusion service. Webmasters could, for a fee, purchase a submission to Yahoo's human compiled directory. The annual yearly fee is about three hundred dollars. The theory is that the listing humans provide will influence web crawlers into giving the website a higher ranking. The paid inclusion program was a lucrative venture for Yahoo but was unpopular with webmasters. Paid inclusion did not guarantee a high ranking; it only guaranteed that the business would be ranked.

Yahoo, like other businesses, keeps its eye on the future. Currently Yahoo offers a multitude of services that cater to nearly all online activities. These services include Yahoo Mail, Yahoo Groups, Yahoo Maps and Driving Directions, and Yahoo Messenger. While Google holds the top spot in search engines Yahoo is standing strong in second place. Yahoo competes by offering its customers vertical search services such as, Yahoo Image, Yahoo Local, Yahoo Shopping Search, Yahoo Video, and Yahoo! News. Although Yahoo is second to Google it is still a favorite among many online search engine users. As the history of yahoo continues to unfold the future looks bright.