YAHOO

Yahoo Inc. (also known simply as Yahoo!) is an American multinational

technology company headquartered in Sunnyvale, California. Yahoo was founded
by Jerry Yang and David Filo in January 1994 and was incorporated on March 2,
1995. Yahoo was one of the pioneers of the early internet era in the 1990s.Marissa
Mayer, a former Google executive, Google Employee number 20, and Google's
first female Engineer, serves as CEO and President of Yahoo

It is globally known for its Web portal, search engine Yahoo! Search, and related
services, including Yahoo! Directory, Yahoo! Mail, Yahoo! News, Yahoo!
Finance, Yahoo! Groups, Yahoo! Answers, advertising, online mapping, video
sharing, fantasy sports, and its social media website. It is one of the most popular
sites in the United States. According to third-party web analytics providers, Alexa
and SimilarWeb, Yahoo! is the highest-read news and media website, with over 7
billion views per month, being the sixth most visited website globally, As of 28
December 2016.According to news sources, roughly 700 million people visit
Yahoo websites every month. Yahoo itself claims it attracts "more than half a
billion consumers every month in more than 30 languages".

Founding

Jerry Yang and David Filo, the founders of Yahoo

In January 1994 Yang and Filo were electrical engineering graduate students at
Stanford University, when they created a website named "Jerry and David's guide
to the World Wide Web" The site was a directory of other websites, organized in a
hierarchy, as opposed to a searchable index of pages. In March 1994, "Jerry and
David's Guide to the World Wide Web" was renamed "Yahoo! The "yahoo.com"
domain was created on January 18, 1995

The word "yahoo" is a backronym for "Yet Another Hierarchically Organized or

"Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle". The term "hierarchical" described
how the Yahoo database was arranged in layers of subcategories. The term
"oracle" was intended to mean "source of truth and wisdom", and the term
"officious", rather than being related to the word's normal meaning, described the
many office workers who would use the Yahoo database while surfing from work.
However, Filo and Yang insist they mainly selected the name because they liked
the slang definition of a "yahoo" (used by college students in David Filo's native
Louisiana in the late 1980s and early 1990s to refer to an unsophisticated, rural
Southerner): "rude, unsophisticated, uncouth." This meaning derives from the
Yahoo race of fictional beings from Gulliver's Travels.

Expansion

Yahoo grew rapidly throughout the 1990s. Like many search engines and web
directories, Yahoo added a web portal. By 1998, Yahoo was the most popular
starting point for web users It also made many high-profile acquisitions. Its stock
price skyrocketed during the dot-com bubble, Yahoo stocks closing at an all-time
high of $118.75 a share on January 3, 2000. However, after the dot-com bubble
burst, it reached a post-bubble low of $8.11 on September 26, 2001.

Yahoo headquarters in 2001

Yahoo began using Google for search in 2000. Over the next four years, it
developed its own search technologies, which it began using in 2004. In response
to Google's Gmail, Yahoo began to offer unlimited email storage in 2007. The
company struggled through 2008, with several large layoffs.

In February 2008 Microsoft Corporation made an unsolicited bid to acquire Yahoo

for $44.6 billion. Yahoo formally rejected the bid, claiming that it "substantially
undervalues" the company and was not in the interest of its shareholders. Three
years later Yahoo had a market capitalization of $22.24 billion. Carol Bartz
replaced Yang as CEO in January 2009. In September 2011 she was removed from
her position at Yahoo by the company's chairman Roy Bostock, and CFO Tim
Morse was named as Interim CEO of the company.

In early 2012, after the appointment of Scott Thompson as CEO, rumors began to
spread about looming layoffs. Several key executives, such as Chief Product
Officer Blake Irving left On April 4, 2012, Yahoo announced a cut of 2,000 jobs
or about 14 percent of its 14,100 workers. The cut was expected to save around
$375 million annually after the layoffs are completed at end of 2012. In an email
sent to employees in April 2012, Thompson reiterated his view that customers
should come first at Yahoo. He also completely reorganized the company.

On May 13, 2012, Yahoo issued a press release stating that Thompson was no
longer with the company, and would immediately be replaced on an interim basis
by Ross Levinsohn, recently appointed head of Yahoo's new Media group.
Thompson's total compensation for his 130-day tenure with Yahoo was at least
$7.3 million.

On July 16, 2012, Marissa Mayer was appointed President and CEO of Yahoo,
effective the following day.

Yahoo! sign at Times Square

On May 19, 2013 the Yahoo board approved a $1.1 billion purchase of blogging
site Tumblr, and the company's CEO and founder David Karp will remain a large
shareholder. The announcement reportedly signifies a changing trend in the
technology industry, as large corporations like Yahoo, Facebook, and Google
acquire start-up Internet companies that generate low amounts of revenue as a way
in which to connect with sizeable, fast-growing online communities. The Wall
Street Journal stated that the purchase of Tumblr would satisfy the company's need
for "a thriving social-networking and communications hub." On May 20, the
company announced the acquisition of Tumblr officially. The company also
announced plans to open a San Francisco office in July 2013

On August 2, 2013, Yahoo Inc. announced the acquisition of social Web browser
concern RockMelt. With the acquisition, the RockMelt team, including the
concern's CEO Eric Vishria and CTO Tim Howes, will be the part of Yahoo team.
As a result, all the RockMelt applications and existing Web services were
terminated on August 31.

Data collated by comScore during July 2013, revealed that more people in the U.S.
visited Yahoo Web sites during the month in comparison to Google Web sites; the
occasion was the first time that Yahoo outperformed Google since 2011. The data
did not incorporate visit statistics for the Yahoo-owned Tumblr site or mobile
phone usage.

2014-Present

On March 12, 2014, Yahoo officially announced its partnership with Yelp, Inc
intended to help Yahoo boost its local search results and better compete with
services like Google

On November 11, 2014, Yahoo announced it would acquire video ad company

BrightRoll for $640 million. Video was one of the company's key growth areas and
the acquisition made Yahoo's video ad platform the largest in the U.S

On November 21, 2014, it was announced that Yahoo had acquired Cooliris

By the fourth quarter of 2013, the company's share price (NASDAQ: YHOO) had
more than doubled since Marissa Mayer took over as president in July 2012;
however, the share price peaked at about $35 in November 2013 It did go up to
$36.04 in the mid afternoon of December 2, 2015, perhaps on news that the board
of directors was meeting to decide on the future of Mayer, whether to sell the
struggling internet business, and whether to continue with the spinoff of its stake
in China's Alibaba e-commerce site. Not all had gone well during Mayer's tenure,
including the $1.1 billion acquisition of Tumblr that had yet to prove beneficial
and the forays into original video content that led to a $42 million write-down.
Sydney Finkelstein, a professor at Dartmouth College's Tuck School of Business,
told the Washington Post that sometimes, "the single best thing you can do ... is
sell the company."[53] The closing price of Yahoo! Inc. on December 7, 2015 was
$34.68.[54]

The Wall Street Journal's Douglas MacMillan reported on February 2, 2016 that
Yahoo's CEO Marissa Mayer was expected to cut 15% of its workforce.

On September 22, 2016, Yahoo disclosed a data breach in which hackers stole
information associated with at least 500 million user accounts in late 2014
According to the BBC, this was the largest technical breach reported to date. On
December 14, 2016, the company revealed that another separate data breach had
occurred in 2014, with hackers obtaining sensitive account information, including
security questions, to at least one billion accounts This hack was considered to be a
record, in terms of numbers of accounts compromised In addition to user
information, the hackers gained access to Yahoo's cookie creation software.

SEC filings in January 2017 stated that if Verizon followed through with the $4.8
billion acquisition of Yahoo!, that this would only be the core Internet business,
and the remaining Yahoo divisions would be rebranded as Altaba, said to be
created from "alternative and Alibaba". Mayer and many others on the current
executive staff would step down during this process. Yahoo delayed the the merger
later in the month due to security concerns following two data breaches