1. Yahoo was first started by Jerry Yang and David Filo in February, 1994. It did not start as a search engine. In fact, they started it to keep track of their own interests online. Later it turned into a simple catalog which contained the site links in the Internet.
2. From there, it developed into a web directory, where only web page information are collated and divided into subcategories. In autumn 1994 the catalog contained more than 1 million of requests and about 100.000 thousand of users. Yahoo began as a project created by two individuals and has grown to employ estimated 13,000 full time individuals.
3. The project was initially named as Jerry’s Guide to the World Wide Web. In April the name of Jerry’s Guide to the World Wide Web was changed to Yahoo. Yahoo is actually an acronym for Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle.
4. At that time “Yahoo” was already trademarked by a company that produced barbecue (BBQ) sauce, knives and human propelled watercraft. For this reason Yang and Filo added the exclamation point to the end of Yahoo!
5. Yahoo currently owns and operates over fifty different web properties, most of which are sites that gained popularity before being acquired by Yahoo. Some examples include Geocities, Yahoo! Games, Del.icio.us, Flickr, and Upcoming.org. Most of these acquired companies are from the United States.
6. Yahoo’s email service, which they purchased from Four11, is still considered to be the most popular email program in the world. The company also bought such projects as HotJobs and Flicker which were later integrated to their own portal.
7. On November 30, 2008, Microsoft offered to buy Yahoo!’s search business for $20 billion. However, on July 29, 2009, a 10 year deal with Microsoft was done which gave microsoft full access to Yahoo!’s search for its search engine, Bing.
8. Yahoo used Google company technologies for the realization of their search system, but in February 2004 all the agreements with Google have been cancelled. However, after several years the company succeeded to become the leader in the sphere of the e-search.
9. The average Yahoo! Messenger chit-chat is 17 times longer than one on a cell phone. It would take 7,000 years for all the photos on Flickr to be developed. Yahoo! Groups has more members than the number of International Red Cross volunteers. And, it would take 50,000 planes to fly all of the Yahoo! Travel users on a group vacation.
10. Today, Yahoo takes the second place as for the popularity in the world among the search systems, and the first place as for the number of users registered on the Yahoo portal, which provides with a list of services, such as Yahoo Mail, Yahoo Games, Yahoo Music and so on.
11. One of Yahoo’s highest priced acquisitions was yahoo, which they paid a reported $5.7 billion for. On the other hand, their cheapest acquisition was their purchase of Net Controls for slightly over $1 million in 1997. One of Yahoo’s priciest acquisitions ever was Broadcast.com. The company paid a whopping $5.7 billion for the company. Incidentally, the acquisition also figures in Forbes’ list of technology industry’s worst acquisitions.
12. The owners of Yahoo considered buying Google before went public. However, at the time Yahoo decided that a few billion dollars was too much to pay to buy out their competitor. During a talk, former Yahoo CEO Terry Semel disclosed that the company considered buying Google before it went public. Semel had dinner with Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin and he offered them to buy Google. Both Page and Brin reportedly replied that they wanted $1 billion and didn’t want to sell. Another dinner followed and Semel agreed to pay $1 billion.
13. Yahoo! stocks highest closing was at $118.75 a share on 3 January 2000. The Dot Com Bubble brought Yahoo stock to all-time low of $8.11.
14. In 2005, Yahoo invested $1 billion in Alibaba, one of China’s hottest startups at that time. The bet paid off spectacularly. Today, Yahoo holds 15% stake in the Chinese retailing giant Alibaba, worth almost $32 billion.
15. Yahoo! launched its new Internet advertisement sales system on February 5, 2007, called Panama.which allows advertisers to bid for search terms.
Bonus Fact
Verizon has acquired Yahoo in a $4.83-billion deal. The company’s shareholders and regulators must still approve the deal — the companies expect it to close in early 2017.
The deal represents a stunning decline for a company that was valued at more than $100 billion at its 2000 peak. Yahoo was never really able to adapt its technology and culture for a post-2000 internet that was focused on social media and mobile devices, and so it steadily fell behind rivals such as Google and Facebook.
Interesting Facts About Yahoo
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