Yahoo!

web portal and search engine

Yahoo! Inc. is an American multinational Internet corporation headquartered in Sunnyvale. 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.

Yahoo! had a choice. It chose to provide an e-mail service hosted on servers based inside China, making itself subject to Chinese legal jurisdiction. It didn't have to do that. It could have provided a service hosted offshore only. ~ Rebecca Mackinnon
The United States should lead the world when it comes to transparency, accountability, and respect of civil liberties and human rights. We filed the [law]suit today because we are not authorised at present to break out the number of requests, if any, that we receive for user data under specific national security statutes. We believe that the US government's important responsibility to protect public safety can be carried out without precluding internet companies from sharing the number of national security requests they may receive. ~ Ron Bell

Yahoo! was started at Stanford University. It was founded in January 1994 by Jerry Yang and David Filo, who were Electrical Engineering graduate students when they created a website named "Jerry and David's Guide to the World Wide Web".

Quotes

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  • The Web site started out as Jerry and David's Guide to the World Wide Web but eventually received a new moniker with the help of a dictionary. The name Yahoo! is an acronym for Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle, but Filo and Yang insist they selected the name because they liked the general definition of a yahoo: "rude, unsophisticated, uncouth." Yahoo! itself first resided on Yang's student workstation, "Akebono," while the software was lodged on Filo's computer, "Konishiki" - both named after legendary sumo wrestlers.
  • I originally wrote The w:ONElist File in 2001/2002. It started as my attempt to collect and save as much collateral from ONElist as possible, including emails, press releases, articles, etc. I eventually wrote the story of the first year and a half of ONElist, from the time I thought of the idea, through our Series A venture funding. I haven’t touched it since then; I’m reformatting it now for the new blog.
  • It took a tongue-lashing from Congress before these high-tech titans did the right thing and coughed up some concrete assistance for the family of a journalist whom Yahoo! had helped send to jail...What a disgrace.
  • Yahoo! had a choice. It chose to provide an e-mail service hosted on servers based inside China, making itself subject to Chinese legal jurisdiction. It didn't have to do that. It could have provided a service hosted offshore only.
  • Yahoo was Jerry Yang’s baby. He did a great job creating the baby. Unfortunately, some of the key executives after the foundation of the company couldn’t keep up with the technology innovation of the industry. They thought that Yahoo should become a media company.
  • If they had listened to me and had equal partnerships in China, the U.K., Germany and Brazil, maybe Yahoo in those countries could have become positioned like Yahoo Japan.
  • The early story of Yahoo is now Silicon Valley mythology. As graduate students at the Stanford School of Engineering in 1994, Yang, a math-oriented Taiwanese immigrant, and Filo, a quiet programmer from Louisiana, created a directory of links called Jerry and David’s Guide to the World Wide Web. It was a handy map to what was then an unnavigable digital landscape, and web surfers loved it. The following year, when w:Sequoia Capital invested in the newly renamed startup, it brought in a former Motorola executive named Tim Koogle to be CEO.
  • During the 2000s, Yahoo’s biggest mistakes were failures of will. Semel, billed as a “deals guy” from Hollywood, could have bought Google in 2002, as Fred Vogelstein reported in Wired. Yahoo also came close to buying Facebook in 2006, until Semel lowered his offer from $1 billion to $850 million after a disappointing earnings report, alienating an already reluctant Mark Zuckerberg in the process, according to David Kirkpatrick’s book, The Facebook Effect.
  • At Yahoo, we believe in the transformative power of the Internet. That's why we are so committed to working to support free expression and privacy around the world.
  • We’re shutting down the Yahoo Groups website on December 15, 2020 and members will no longer be able to send or receive emails from Yahoo Groups. Yahoo Mail features will continue to function as expected and there will be no changes to your Yahoo Mail account, emails, photos or other inbox content. There will also be no changes to other Yahoo properties or services. You can find more information about the Yahoo Groups shutdown and alternative service options on this help page.

See also

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Yahoo! at Wikiquote's sister projects:
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