Yahoo!

is an Internet services provider, wholly owned by Verizon Communications through Oath

Inc.[3][4] and headquartered in Sunnyvale, California. The original Yahoo! company was founded
by Jerry Yang and David Filo in January 1994 and was incorporated on March 2, 1995.[5][6] Yahoo
was one of the pioneers of the early Internet era in the 1990s.[7] Marissa Mayer, a
former Google executive, served as CEO and President of Yahoo until June 2017.[8]
It was globally known for its Web portal, search engine Yahoo! Search, and related services,
including Yahoo! Directory, Yahoo! Mail, Yahoo! News, Yahoo! Finance, Yahoo! Groups, Yahoo!
Answers, advertising, online mapping, video sharing, fantasy sports, and its social media website. At
its height it was one of the most popular sites in the United States.[9] According to third-party web
analytics providers, Alexa and SimilarWeb, Yahoo! was the highest-read news and media website,
with over 7 billion views per month, being the sixth most visited website globally in
2016.[2][10][11] According to news sources, roughly 700 million people visited Yahoo websites every
month.[12][13] Yahoo itself claimed it attracted "more than half a billion consumers every month in more
than 30 languages".[14]
Once the most popular website in the U.S., Yahoo slowly started to decline since the late
2000s,[15] and in 2017, Verizon Communications acquired most of Yahoo's Internet business for
$4.48 billion, excluding its stakes in Alibaba Group and Yahoo! Japan which were transferred to
Yahoo's successor company Altaba.[16]

Founding

In January 1994, Yang and Filo were electrical engineering graduate students at Stanford University,
when they created a website named "Jerry and David's guide to the World Wide Web".[17][18] The site
was a directory of other websites, organized in a hierarchy, as opposed to a searchable index of
pages. In March 1994, "Jerry and David's Guide to the World Wide Web" was renamed
"Yahoo!",[19][20] the human-edited Yahoo! Directory, provided for users to surf through the Internet,
being their first product and original purpose.[21][22] The "yahoo.com" domain was created on January
18, 1995.[23]
The word "yahoo" is a backronym for "Yet Another Hierarchically Organized Oracle"[24] or "Yet
Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle".[25] The term "hierarchical" described how the Yahoo database
was arranged in layers of subcategories. The term "oracle" was intended to mean "source of truth
and wisdom", and the term "officious", rather than being related to the word's normal meaning,
described the many office workers who would use the Yahoo database while surfing from
work.[26]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."[27] This meaning derives from the Yahoo race of fictional beings from Gulliver's Travels.

Expansion
Yahoo grew rapidly throughout the 1990s. Like many search engines and web directories, Yahoo
added a web portal. By 1998, Yahoo was the most popular starting point for web users[28] and the
human-edited Yahoo Directory the most popular search engine.[21] 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 January 3, 2000. However, after the dot-com bubble burst, it
reached a post-bubble low of $8.11 on September 26, 2001.[29]
Yahoo began using Google for search in 2000. Over the next four years, it developed its own search
technologies, which it began using in 2004. In response to Google's Gmail, Yahoo began to offer
unlimited email storage in 2007. The company struggled through 2008, with several large layoffs.[30]
In February 2008, Microsoft Corporation made an unsolicited bid to acquire Yahoo for $44.6 billion.
Yahoo formally rejected the bid, claiming that it "substantially undervalues" the company and was
not in the interest of its shareholders. Three years later Yahoo had a market capitalization of $22.24
billion.[31] Carol Bartz replaced Yang as CEO in January 2009.[32] In September 2011 she was
removed from her position at Yahoo by the company's chairman Roy Bostock, and CFO Tim
Morse was named as Interim CEO of the company.
In early 2012, after the appointment of Scott Thompson as CEO, rumors began to spread about
looming layoffs. Several key executives, such as Chief Product Officer Blake Irving, left.[33] On April 4,
2012, Yahoo announced a cut of 2,000 jobs or about 14 percent of its 14,100 workers. The cut was
expected to save around $375 million annually after the layoffs were completed at end of 2012.[34] In
an email sent to employees in April 2012, Thompson reiterated his view that customers should come
first at Yahoo. He also completely reorganized the company.[35]
On May 13, 2012, Yahoo issued a press release stating that Thompson was no longer with the
company, and would immediately be replaced on an interim basis by Ross Levinsohn, recently
appointed head of Yahoo's new Media group.[35][36][37] Thompson's total compensation for his 130-day
tenure with Yahoo was at least $7.3 million.[38]
On July 16, 2012, Marissa Mayer was appointed President and CEO of Yahoo, effective the
following day.[39]

On May 19, 2013 the Yahoo board approved a $1.1 billion purchase of blogging site Tumblr.
Tumblr's CEO and founder David Karp would remain a large shareholder. The announcement
reportedly signified a changing trend in the technology industry, as large corporations like Yahoo,
Facebook, and Google acquired start-up Internet companies that generated low amounts of revenue
as a way in which to connect with sizeable, fast-growing online communities. The Wall Street
Journal stated that the purchase of Tumblr would satisfy Yahoo's need for "a thriving social-
networking and communications hub."[40][41] On May 20, the company announced the acquisition of
Tumblr officially.[42] The company also announced plans to open a San Francisco office in July
2013.[43]
On August 2, 2013, Yahoo acquired Rockmelt; its staff was retained, but all of its existing products
were terminated.[44]
Data collated by comScore during July 2013, revealed that more people in the U.S. visited Yahoo
websites during the month in comparison to Google; the occasion was the first time that Yahoo
outperformed Google since 2011. The data did not count mobile usage, nor Tumblr.[45]
In November 2014, Yahoo! announced that it would acquire the video
advertising provider BrightRoll for $640 million.[46]
On November 21, 2014, it was announced that Yahoo had acquired Cooliris.[47]

Decline, security breaches, Verizon purchase

By the fourth quarter of 2013, the company's share price had more than doubled since Marissa
Mayer took over as president in July 2012; however, the share price peaked at about $35 in
November 2013.[48] It did go up to $36.04 in the mid-afternoon of December 2, 2015, perhaps on
news that the board of directors was meeting to decide on the future of Mayer, whether to sell the
struggling Internet business,[49] and whether to continue with the spinoff of its stake in China's
Alibaba e-commerce site.[50] Not all had gone well during Mayer's tenure, including the $1.1 billion
acquisition of Tumblr that had yet to prove beneficial and the forays into original video content that
led to a $42 million write-down. Sydney Finkelstein, a professor at Dartmouth College's Tuck School
of Business, told The Washington Post that sometimes, "the single best thing you can do ... is sell
the company."[51] The closing price of Yahoo! Inc. on December 7, 2015 was $34.68.[52]
The Wall Street Journal's Douglas MacMillan reported on February 2, 2016 that Yahoo's CEO
Marissa Mayer was expected to cut 15% of its workforce.[53][54]
On July 25, 2016, Verizon Communications announced that it had agreed to purchase Yahoo's core
Internet business for $4.83 billion.[55][56][57] Following the conclusion of the purchase, these assets will
be merged with AOL to form a new entity known as Oath; Yahoo, AOL, and Huffington Post will
continue to operate under their own names, under the Oath umbrella.[58] The deal excludes Yahoo's
15% stake in Alibaba Group and 35.5% stake in Yahoo! Japan; following the completion of the
acquisition, these assets will be retained under the name Altaba, with a new executive team.[59][60]
On September 22, 2016, Yahoo disclosed a data breach that occurred in late 2014, in which
information associated with at least 500 million user accounts,[61] one of the largest breaches
reported to date.[62] The United States have indicted four men, including two employees of
Russia's Federal Security Service (FSB), for their involvement in the hack.[63][64] On December 14,
2016, the company revealed that another separate data breach had occurred in 2014, with hackers
obtaining sensitive account information, including security questions, to at least one billion
accounts.[65] The company stated that hackers had utilized stolen internal software to
"forge" cookies.[66]
In response to these breaches, Bloomberg News reported that Verizon was attempting to re-
negotiate the deal to reduce the purchase price by $250 million,[67] causing a 2% increase in Yahoo
stock prices.[68] On February 21, 2017, Verizon agreed to lower its purchase price for Yahoo! by $350
million, and share liabilities regarding the investigation into the data breaches.[68]
On June 8, 2017, Yahoo shareholders approved the company's sale of some of its Internet assets to
Verizon for $4.48 billion. The deal officially closed on June 13, 2017.[69][70][71][72][52]