YAHOO Full Form Name
Full
Form of YAHOO:
Yet
Another Hierarchy of Officious Oracle
YAHOO
Full Form is Yet Another Hierarchy of
Officious Oracle. It is a search engine cum internet portal that includes
various applications like Yahoo! Mail, Yahoo! Answers, Yahoo! Directory, Yahoo!
Groups, etc. The Internet is a powerful tool in the current age that has the
capacity to do things that were once imagined to be unimaginable.
It is this extraordinary power that makes the
Internet even more bewitching. Take for example, when you have to look for a
word or certain information, all you need to do is type a few words and get
millions of results within seconds. Imagine the amount of time saved. For the
purpose of this article, we shall discuss something of this sort. It is one of
the most popular search engines in the world, with a very catchy word.
Yahoo! is not just about excitement. It has
dimensions that you must explore in order to fully explore one of the early
competitors of the now most popular search engine in the world, Google. Before
we move to various aspects of Yahoo! we shall have an introductory segment on
this search engine, which shall be followed by other segments on this search
engine. So let us begin with a brief introduction on Yahoooooo!
Introduction to Yahoo!
Yahoo Inc., which is often referred to in its
stylized form Yahoo! is an international technology company that is based in
California, USA. The company is widely recognized for its search engine, a web
engine, and other related facilities such as Yahoo Mail!, Yahoo! Finance,
Yahoo! Answers, Yahoo! Directory, Yahoo! Groups, Online Mapping,
advertisements, and others. It is the widely used websites in the USA.
The company has been ranked at high slots in
SimilarWeb and Alexa, which mention Yahoo! as the most read news and media
portal, with about 7 billion viewers accessing it every month. As of the month
June in the year 2015, the website is the fourth largest visited website in the
world. Many sources state that Yahoo! attracts about 700 million users per
month and Yahoo! Categorically claims that it draws more than a billion users
every month from 30 different languages.
The company was established in January 1995, with
founders being David Filo and Jerry Yang. It was officially incorporated in the
March 1995. In the year 2015, the company made a major announcement to spin off
its stakes in famous Alibaba Group in a distinctly listed company. However,
later in the same year, the company retracted its decision and decided to spin
off its most preferred internet business to a distinct company.
Now that we have discussed the introductory
aspects of one of the most visited websites in the world, Yahoo!, it is the
time we moved to other aspects of the same. The first segment following the
introductory segment would be the foundational and developmental history of the
company. The segment shall explore how the company came into existence and what
followed afterward. The segment will follow by other segments such as Yahoo!
services, Privacy issues, Criticism received throughout its existence, and
other related matters.
Foundation and developmental history of Yahoo!
The foundation history will give an insight as to
how this multinational company came into being. So, let us begin. It all
started in the year 1994, when students from electrical engineering department
from the Stanford University namely, Jerry Yang and David Filo, developed a
website by the name “Jerry and David’s Guide to the WWW (expanded as World Wide
Web). Basically, the website was created as a directory of many other websites,
which were structured in a hierarchy. Later in that year, the website was
renamed as the now Yahoo!.
The word Yahoo has an interesting reasoning. It
is actually the backronym for the terminology“Yet Another Hierarchically
Organized Oracle”. It explains the systematic structuring of the websites in
the directory. The term “oracle” used in the meaning refers to origin of wisdom
and truth. The founders, however, state that they used Yahoo because they loved
it as slang. Hence, the name. Stories say that Filo’s girlfriend would often
refer him as Yahoo.
Soon after the foundation, the website became a
major hit in the internet world. Soon, the website put in a web portal.
Ultimately in the year 1998, the web portal became extremely popular among
users. In the year 2000, Yahoo started using the search engine giant Google for
the purposes of making searches. With the time, it started indulging in the
development of its search technologies, which were effectuated in the year 2004.
As Google started rising to fame with its Gmail service, Yahoo! came up with
unlimited storage service in the year 2007.
In the year 2008, the company faced a series of
layoffs. In the year 2008, the software giant Microsoft Corporation attempted
to purchase Yahoo! but the latter refused to accept the bid, stating that it
undermines the value of the company on the whole. In the following year,
Jerry Yang was replaced by Carol Bartz, who herself was eventually removed from
her position by Roy Bostock, the Chairman. Tim Morse, the then CFO, was made
the interim CEO of Yahoo.
In the year 2012, Scott Thompson was appointed as
the new CEO of the company but his appointment witnessed some of the worst
layoff incidents. There were massive cuts in employees in that year on the
ground of financial constraints. Marissa Mayer as the CEO and the President
later replaced him in the same year.
In the year 2013, Yahoo! entered into a
breakthrough agreement, resulting in the purchase of the widely popular
blogging website, Tumblr, with its founder and the CEO David Karp remaining as
a major shareholder. The purchase is stated to make positive effects on Yahoo!
as it places the company in the same line as that of other multinational
corporations such as Facebook, Google, which themselves are acquiring small
companies to connect with a larger proportion of online communities.
In the same year, Yahoo Inc made an announcement
that it would acquire RockMelt, a social Web browser. With the acquisition, the
CEO of the latter company would become a part of Yahoo!. In order to boost up
its search results, Yahoo! entered into partnership with Yelp, Inc. In the same
year, it announced that it would acquire BrightRoll, a video advertisement
company. This acquisition would make Yahoo!’s video platform the biggest in the
United States of America. It also announced that it would acquire Cooliris.
Communication services offered by Yahoo!
Starting from this segment, we shall discuss
various services that Yahoo! provides. The first such service would be
Communication service that it provides in varied forms and on different
platforms. So, let us start our discussion with a brief mention of those
platforms operated by Yahoo!
Yahoo! Messenger is probably the most popular
feature of Yahoo! services. It is one of the widely used messengers in the
world, which offers messaging, video calling and international chat services to
its registered users. Another service popularly used for communication purposes
is the Yahoo Mail. In order to compete with the fast-growing Gmail, the company
announced that the e-mail service would provide unlimited storage service since
the year 2007.
Apart from the aforementioned services, we have
My Web, Yahoo Personals, Delicious, Yahoo 360, Flickr, and yahoo Buzz. The
company, however, closed down its operations on MyBlog Log and Yahoo Buzz. In
the year 2011, Yahoo! made an announcement declaring that Yahoo 360 service
would be discontinued.
Content related services of Yahoo!
Under this segment, we shall discuss various
services that allow content contribution and reading to users. Yahoo provides
various such services such as Yahoo Finance, Yahoo Sports, Yahoo Movies, Yahoo!
Answers, Yahoo Games, Yahoo Music, and others. Of all of them, Yahoo! Answers
is the most popularly used service.
There is a personalization facility that Yahoo
provides, which comes by the name My Yahoo. This service allows users to
customize Yahoo features in whatever manner they desire. In the year 2008, the
company came up with a website called Shine, which enables women to seek advice
in between the ages 25 to 54.
Advertisement services of Yahoo.
To any online enterprise, advertisements would
make a major source of revenue and thus, Yahoo is no exception. The Yahoo!
Search Marketing facilities services such as Local advertising, Sponsored
Search, Directory, that allows enterprises to show advertisements about their
services and products with the help of Yahoo network. In the year 2010, the
Yahoo Publisher Network was relaunched as a tool of advertisement that enabled
online publishers to monetize their sites with the help of relevant
advertisements.
In the year 2007, Yahoo had launched Panama,
which is an Internet advertisement sales system. This online facility allows
advertisements to bid for search terms to promote their ads on the results page
of the search engine. The system takes into account bids, quality of the
advertisements, rates per click, and other relevant factors. This is one of the
ways Yahoo earns most of its profit. APT from Yahoo, which was previously known
as AMP from Yahoo was announced. It is an online management program that causes
unification of the buyer and seller market.
Defunct Services of Yahoo
Yahoo started off as a major hit, however, with
time it could not continue with most of its services and products, particularly
because of its plummeting financial resources. Under this segment, we shall
discuss some of those now defunct services of Yahoo.
The first service for our discussion is
Geocities, which was founded in the year 1995. It is regarded as one of the
pioneering services that provided web pages to the public. Once upon a time, it
had become so popular that it became the most browsed website on WWW (nothing
but World Wide Web).
In the year 1999, the website was purchased by
Yahoo, however, ten years later the service was shut down. Then we have Yahoo
Go—which was a phone application functioning on Java—that was closed down in
the year 2010. The once famous Yahoo 360 service became defunct in the year
2007. It was a popular blogging service that was launched in the year 2005.
However, the service was closed within four years
of its launch. Yahoo Mash Beta is yet another website that was eventually
closed down. Yahoo tech, which was providing product information & other
related services, was closed down in the year 2010, about four years after its
launch.
Another service by the name Yahoo Koprol was a
geo-tagging facility based in Indonesia. It was a very useful facility from
yahoo wherein users can share information about various locations with the help
of GPS devices. The service was shut down in the year 2012 because of the lack
of revenue generation.
Yahoo Mail Classic was also closed down in the
year 2013, along with other previous versions of Yahoo Mail. Additionally,
other services such as Yahoo Deals, Yahoo Kids, Upcoming, Yahoo SMS Alerts and
Messenger feature Phone (abbreviated as J2ME) were shut down in the same year.
Privacy issues with Yahoo
There have been many controversies that brought
Yahoo to bad light. One such controversy falls into issues relating to privacy.
In the year 2013, an Indian Daily The Indian Express has published
that Yahoo had received about 29000 requests seeking information about its
users from governments and most of these requests came from the United States
of America.
In the same year, The Washington Post
published that the United States National Security Agency tapped communications
among Yahoo data centers, as a part of its MUSCULAR program. In the year 2014,
the company reported that it has been witnessing multiple attempts to hack into
millions of accounts of Yahoo users. This made Yahoo caution its users and urge
them to change their passwords.
Criticism
In the year 2000, a lawsuit was filed against
Yahoo in France that sought prevention of sale of Nazi memorabilia to French
people. Yahoo has been criticized for allowing ads through the Yahoo Ad Network
to those companies that display the ads with the help of spyware. Yahoo has
also been accused of helping Chinese authorities to apprehend Li Zhi and Jiang
Lijun, the dissidents. There have been other issues relating to its chat rooms,
which were eventually closed down in the year 2005.
For Further Reading:
https://in.yahoo.com/https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yahoo!