About Yahoo
History of Yahoo!
Yahoo! Capabilities
History of Yahoo
Founders Yang and Filo developed the crawlers for the search engine by initiative whilst at Stanford University in the early 1990s. The two bored PhD students created an internet crawler that pulled data from basketball sites in order to select the best team in a fantasy basketball league. Filo compiled the data and together the duo analysed it to determine their team selections. They ended up winning the league!
Yang created a web browser called Mosaic that listed all interesting websites, and Filo created software that automated the list. In late 1994 'Jerry and David's Guide to the World Wide Web' was launched to collaborate their findings.
Within the first thirty days of launch the site had logged visitors from 30 different countries.
In 1995, the founders started to take search more seriously as Yang's machine tried to cope with the demand. The founders were inspired by computer acronyms that started with 'YA' (for yet another). The most appropriate acronym was YAHOO: Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle. Hierarchical was the key word for the founders because they wanted to give quality results.
Late on in 1995 Tim Koogle was employed as Yahoo's first CEO (slightly ironic name, but true!). He and the founders were able to use user's activities and quickly realized what was important to them. This led to the launch of Yahoo Finance and Yahooligans (for kids).
Koogle, who was a former Motorola Executive, ran the company. Yang focused on the product, and Filo tended to the company's ever growing technology infrastructure.
In 1995, AOL informed Yahoo that if they didn't sell to them for $8 million, AOL would kill the company within the year. Koogle set out to employ a team to strengthen their service.
Yahoo forged a deal with Netscape who, at the time, was at the centre of the web as its first time users were sent to their homepage. This was a great source of traffic, and Yahoo was a top link on Netscape's site.
By 2002 it was clear that a successful search engine needed three criteria; a natural search listing, a paid search listing, and its own source of traffic. Yahoo only had one of these, the natural listings. In 2002 Yahoo was outsourcing its paid search listings to Overture. In December 2002 it bought Inktomi to strengthen its own search technology.
In the winter of 2002, both Yahoo and Microsoft set about acquiring Overture, however it was Yahoo who landed the deal for $1.63 billion. This deal has provided Yahoo with its paid search listings since that day.
Until 2003 Yahoo treated search as a partner driven service, after acquiring Open Text, AltaVista, and Inktomi.
Since Google launched the relevancy ranking method called Quality Score for its sponsored links back in 2005, Google has widened its margin between themselves and Yahoo. Yahoo have been developing their own version called Panama Project, which has been launched in the US in November 2006. It is still being refined however it is set to be introduced in the UK in the first quarter of 2007.
Yahoo! Capabilities:
Pay Per Click: Reach 22.5% of internet searches by targeting on Yahoo! For more information about our capabilities on Yahoo! Visit our PPC page.
Mobile Phone Ads: We can capitalize on advertising your business through Yahoo! and its mobile search partner Orange, covering 20% of all mobile phone search queries. For more information visit our Mobile Phone Ads page.
Local Business Ads: Your customers can find you under Yahoo!'s local business search tool. For more information about how we can set up strategic local campaign for your business visit our Local Business Ads page.
Banner Advertising: Build up your brand by reaching 53% of all unique browsers. Find out more on our page.
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