Yahoo! Inc. (NASDAQ: YHOO) is an American
multinational internet corporation headquartered in Sunnyvale, California, United States. The
company is perhaps best known for its web portal, search engine (Yahoo! Search), Yahoo!
Directory, Yahoo! Mail, Yahoo! News, advertising, online mapping (Yahoo! Maps), video
sharing (Yahoo! Video), and social media websites and services. It is one of the largest websites
in the United States.[2]
Yahoo! inclusive was founded by Jerry Yang and David Filo in January 1994 and was
incorporated on March 1, 1995. On January 13, 2009, Yahoo! appointed Carol Bartz, former
executive chairman of Autodesk, as its new chief executive officer and a member of the board of
directors.[3] On September 6, 2011, Bartz was removed from her position at Yahoo! by chairman
Roy Bostock, over the phone; and CFO Tim Morse was named as Interim CEO of the
company.[4][5]
Roughly 700 million people visit Yahoo websites every month.[6]
In January 1995, Jerry Yang and David Filo were electrical engineering graduate students at
Stanford University when they created a website named "David and Jerry's Guide to the World
Wide Web".[7] David and Jerry's Guide to the World Wide Web was a directory of other
websites, organized in a hierarchy, as opposed to a searchable index of pages. In April 1994,
"David and Jerry's Guide to the World Wide Web" was renamed "Yahoo!".[8][9] The yahoo.com
domain was created on January 18, 1995.[10] The word is an acronym for "Yet Another
Hierarchical Officious Oracle."[11] The term "hierarchical" described how the Yahoo! database
was arranged in directory layers. The term "oracle" was intended to mean "source of truth and
wisdom," and "officious" described the many office workers who would use the Yahoo! database
while surfing from work.[12] However, Filo and Yang insist they mainly selected the name
because they liked the slang definition of a "yahoo" (used by college students in David Filo's
native Louisiana in the late 1980s and early 1990s to refer to an unsophisticated, rural
Southerner): "rude, unsophisticated, uncouth." Filo's college girlfriend often referred to Filo as a
"yahoo." "Yahoo" also stems from the name of a fictional being from Gulliver's Travels.
Yahoo! grew rapidly throughout the 1990s. Like many search engines and web directories,
Yahoo! diversified into a Web portal. It also made many high-profile acquisitions. Its stock price
skyrocketed during the dot-com bubble, Yahoo! stocks closing at an all-time high of $118.75 a
share on 3 January 2000. However, after the dot-com bubble burst, it settled at a post-bubble low
of $4.05 on 26 September 2001.
In 2000, Yahoo! began using Google for search results. Over the next four years, it developed its
own search technologies, which it began using in 2004. Yahoo! also revamped its mail service to
compete with Google's Gmail in 2007. The company struggled through 2008, with several large
layoffs.
In February 2008, Microsoft Corporation made an unsolicited bid to acquire Yahoo! for USD
$44.6 billion. Yahoo! subsequently formally rejected the bid, claiming that it "substantially
undervalues" Yahoo! and was not in the interest of its shareholders. Three years later, Yahoo!
had a stock market capitalization of USD $22.24 billion.[13] Carol Bartz replaced cofounder Jerry
Yang in January 2009.[14] In September 2011 she was removed from her position at Yahoo! by
the company's chairman Roy Bostock (via phone call), and CFO Tim Morse was named as
Interim CEO of the company.