Yahoo!

Yahoo! Inc. is an American public corporation and global Internet services company. It provides a range of products and services including a web portal, a search engine, the Yahoo! Directory, Yahoo! Mail, news, and posting. It was founded by Stanford University graduate students Jerry Yang and David Filo in January of 1994 and incorporated on March 2, 1995. The company’s headquarters are in Sunnyvale, California.

According to Web traffic analysis, Yahoo! has been one of the most visited websites on the Internet. Yahoo claims about 500 million users worldwide. Nearly two-thirds of Yahoo’s revenue comes from the United States, while the remainder comes from abroad. Yahoo has offices in more than 20 markets globally, and most of its offerings are available in more than 20 languages.

“Yahoo! Search” is a web search engine, owned by Yahoo! and is the second largest search engine on the internet. Yahoo also provides vertical search services such as Yahoo! Image, Yahoo! Video, Yahoo! Local, Yahoo! News, and Yahoo! Shopping Search.

Originally, “Yahoo! Search” merely referred to a Yahoo! provided interface, which would send queries to another search engine “behind the scenes”. The results were presented to the user under the Yahoo! brand. Originally, none of the actual web crawling and storage/retrieval of data was done by Yahoo! itself.

Seeking to provide its own search engine results, Yahoo! acquired other companies with their own search engines. In 2002, it bought Inktomi, a “behind the scenes” search engine, whose results are shown on other companies’ web sites. In 2003, it bought Overture Services, Inc., which owned the AlltheWeb and AltaVista search engines. Initially, even though it owned multiple search engines, it didn’t use them on the main Yahoo.com web site, but kept using Google’s search engine for its results.

However, starting in 2003, Yahoo! Search became an original web crawler-based search engine, with a reinvented crawler called Yahoo! Slurp. Yahoo! Search combined the capabilities of search engine companies it had acquired, with its existing research, and put them into a single search engine. Its new search engine results were included in all of Yahoo!’s sites that had a web search function. It also started to sell its search engine results to other companies, to show on their web sites. Its relationship with Google was terminated at that time, with the former partners becoming each other’s main competitors.

Industry analysts have recently suggested that Yahoo! should outsource search to Google. Apparently Yahoo! has decided against this, even though Google’s search process is known to be more efficient than Yahoo!’s and yields higher ad revenue.

Yahoo UK has recently launched “Search Suggest” at Yahoo Search for UK users. When a user begins to type a keyword, Yahoo will now automatically offer them suggestions based on what has been typed. Not only does this limit the number of words needed to type into a query, it may also present similar queries to shorten searching time and produce more relevant results more quickly.