In addition to Google, Yahoo is also one of the largest Internet companies. Around 700 million people around the world use Yahoo’s numerous online services, including mail, chat, videos and news.
The Meaning of “Yahoo”
According to beautyphoon.com, Yahoo is the acronym for Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle. The two founders Jerry Yang and David Filo emphasize, however, that they took the name because of the literal meaning. Literally translated “yahoo” means “uncouth”, “raw” or “unadulterated”.
What services does Yahoo offer?
Like Google, Yahoo also offers a wide range of online services in addition to the search engine. In Germany, the most popular Yahoo products include:
- Yahoo home page
- Yahoo search engine
- Yahoo news
- Flickr
- Yahoo Messenger
- Yahoo Mail
The e-mail service has the highest share, even if the number of users has been falling almost steadily since 2009.
The beginnings of the company
The beginnings of the Yahoo! can be found in 1994, when Stanford students David Filo and Jerry Yang set up their “Guide to the World Wide Web” in their caravan as a hobby and only for their private use. This is how the first and oldest link directory was created, the idea of which is the basis of the thousands of web directories and web catalogs that exist around the world today. The directory quickly became very popular and within a few months it had more than a million inquiries.
Yahoo was officially founded in 1995, and the company went public a year later. The German portal version has existed since 1996. In the following years, Yahoo expanded to include France, Australia and Argentina. Today Yahoo is an internationally oriented Internet company.
Advertising income as the largest pillar
Yahoo generates most of its income from advertising. This enabled the company to achieve very high profits, especially in the nineties. However, there was a slump due to the dot-com bubble at the turn of the millennium. In the years that followed, sales stagnated, which ultimately led Yahoo to change its business strategy.
The range of free services such as e-mails has been expanded to include paid services. As part of this change, Yahoo bought Flickr and HotJobs, for example.
At the beginning of 2014, the current CEO, Marissa Mayer, presented her strategy for how the company should increase advertising income in the future. This includes, above all, online magazines for mobile devices on various topics, with advertising being incorporated into the articles.
Yahoo Partnerships and Acquisitions
Over time, Yahoo has acquired numerous smaller and larger companies or entered into strategic partnerships:
Microsoft
2009 marks the beginning of the partnership between Yahoo and Microsoft. It is about the search technology of both companies: Microsoft would like to improve its search engine Bing through the Yahoo search technology in order to be able to compete better with Google. Since the beginning of the partnership, Yahoo’s search has been based on Bing. In return, Yahoo will take care of the online advertising for both companies. The partnership is initially planned for 10 years.
Flickr
The takeover of the picture portal Flickr took place in March 2005 and is said to have cost around 35 million dollars. Flickr is now firmly integrated into the Yahoo services and can only be used with a Yahoo account.
Tumblr
2013 Yahoo takes over the blog portal Tumblr. Price: $ 1.1 billion. Yahoo wanted to score points with the younger target group, of whom more and more are using Tumblr as an alternative to Facebook. There are more than 100 million blogs on Tumblr, and almost 100 million new entries are added every day in the form of images, posts or blog entries.
Hacker attack and billions claim
In 2012, Yahoo suffered a few setbacks. Jerry Yang, one of the two founders, left the company. There was also a hacker attack in which around 450,000 customer data was stolen. According to the hackers, the data was insufficiently secured and even unencrypted. Incidentally, there were similar attacks at the beginning of 2014, although the data was probably transmitted via other companies.
Also in 2012, Yahoo was fined € 2.7 billion in Mexico. The reason: breach of contract. The companies Ideas Interactivas and Worldwide Directories accused the company of having made a profit due to a service directory. Yahoo has appealed and denied all allegations. The outcome of the process is open.
Yahoo vs. Google
Until February 2004, Yahoo used data from Altavista, Inktomi and Google for its search engine. After the contractual relationship with Google ended, the company used its own search algorithms. With the partnership with Microsoft in 2009, the Yahoo search engine produces almost identical results to Bing.
In Germany, according to survey results from the beginning of 2015, Yahoo is in third place behind Google and Bing. This corresponds to a market share of 1.66 percent. In the USA, however, the distribution looks a little different. Yahoo and Mozilla have been partners since November 2014. The effects on Google were already visible a month later, with a market share falling from 77.3 to 75.2 percent. For Google, this is the worst value in the US since 2008.
