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Yahoo!
Yahoo is the fourth-most visited website and offers a range of services including a search engine, news, a microblogging platform, photo storage and sharing, e-mail, and much more.
Yahoo! was founded in 1994 and was initially a web directory named Jerry and David's Guide to the World Wide Web. In 1995, the site was moved to yahoo.com.
Yahoo's homepage is best thought of as a web portal built on content supplied by Yahoo properties, which inlcudes a number of industry-leading services:
- Yahoo! Search: The third largest search engine on the web.
- Yahoo! Mail: One of the most popular free e-mail services.
- Yahoo! News: Both a news-aggregator as well as a source of original news content, and the second most-viewed news site on the web.
- Yahoo! Sports: The most-visited sports website, and the first website to earn exclusive rights to broadcast an NFL game live online.
- Yahoo! Finance: The most-visited finance website. Yahoo Finance includes financial market news, stock quotes, personal finance tools, and more.
- Yahoo! Groups: One of the largest collections of online discussion boards.
- Yahoo! Answers: A question and answer platform where users can post questions, and reply to questions posted by other users.
- Tumblr: A social network and microblogging platform. Founded in 2007, Tumblr was acquired by Yahoo in 2013 for $1.1 billion.
- Flickr: A photo and video hosting service commonly used to host images that are embedded in other websites and shared on social media.
Also See: Search Engine, Directory, Google.
Frequently Asked Questions
Who owns Yahoo?
Yahoo was a privately-held company when it was founded in 1994. However, things didn't stay that way for long, and Yahoo held an initial public offering on April 12, 1996. Today, you can visit Yahoo Finance to check on Yahoo stock performance.
What became of Jerry and David's Guide to the World Wide Web?
Jerry and David's guide grew into Yahoo Directory, and was Yahoo's primary product for a number of years. In 2002, a web crawler-based search engine replaced the directory as the source of the main Yahoo search results, and, as a result, Yahoo Directory was no longer as important. Yahoo Directory was closed at the end of 2014.
What is microblogging?
Tumblr, a Yahoo product, is best described as a social network with microblogging at its core. Microblogging is basically short-form blogging. While standard blog posts typically range in length from a few hundred words up to a few thousand words, microblog posts are much shorter, typically posted much more frequently, and often include (or may be comprised entirely of) videos and images.
What is a web portal?
A web portal is a webpage that pulls together information from various sources and presents it in an organized fashion. Yahoo does this by sourcing content from its own properties including news stories, trending Flickr images, a search feature, trending search terms, and links to other Yahoo sites. In addition, Yahoo offers My Yahoo, a customizable portal where registered users can pick the content that appears on the page and organize according to their personal preferences.