Yahoo Com
As a result, many of the acquisitions were controversial and unpopular with users of the existing services.
Yahoo! headquarters in Sunnyvale
Dot-com bubble (2000–2001)
Yahoo! stock doubled in price in the last month of 1999. On January 3, 2000, at the height of the Dot-com boom, Yahoo! stocks closed at an all-time high of $118.75 a share. Sixteen days later, shares in Yahoo! Japan became the first stocks in Japanese history to trade at over ¥100,000,000, reaching a price of ¥101.4 million ($94,780 at that time).
On February 7, 2000, the Yahoo! domain was brought to a halt for a few hours as it was the victim of a distributed denial of service attack (DDoS). On the next day, its shares rose about $16, or 4.5 percent as the failure was blamed on hackers rather than on an internal glitch, unlike a fault with eBay earlier that year.
During the dot-com boom, the cable news station CNBC also reported that Yahoo! and eBay were discussing a 50/50 merger. Although the merger never materialized the two companies decided to form a marketing/advertising alliance six years later in 2006.
On June 26, 2000, Yahoo! and Google signed an agreement which retained Google as the default world-wide-web search engine for Yahoo! following a beta trial in 1999.
Post dot-com bubble (2002–2009)
Yahoo! was one of the few surviving large Internet companies after the dot-com bubble burst.
Nevertheless, on September 26, 2001, Yahoo! stocks closed at a five-year low of $4.06 (split-adjusted).
Yahoo! formed partnerships with telecommunications and Internet providers to create content-rich broadband services to compete with AOL. On June 3, 2002, SBC and Yahoo! launched a national co-branded dial service. In July 2003, BT Openworld announced an alliance with Yahoo!. On August 23, 2005, Yahoo! and Verizon launched an integrated DSL service.
In late 2002, Yahoo! began to bolster its search services by acquiring other search engines.
In February 2005, Yahoo! acquired Konfabulator and rebranded it Yahoo! Widgets, a desktop application and in July 2003, it acquired Overture Services, Inc. On February 18, 2004, Yahoo! dropped Google-powered results and returned to using its own technology to provide search results.
In 2004, in response to Google's release of Gmail, Yahoo! upgraded the storage of all free Yahoo! Mail accounts from 4 MB to 1 GB, and all Yahoo! Mail Plus accounts to 2 GB.
In 2007, Yahoo! took out the storage meters, thus allowing users unlimited storage.
Yahoo! continued acquiring companies to expand its range of services, particularly Web 2.0 services. In June 2005, Yahoo! acquired blo.gs, a service based on RSS feed aggregation.
Yahoo! acquired social bookmark site del.icio.us on December 9, 2005 and then playlist sharing community webjay on January 9, 2006.
On August 27, 2007, Yahoo! released a new version of Yahoo! Mail. At the time, analysts were skeptical about the wisdom of a business combination.
On February 1, 2008, after its friendly takeover offer was rebuffed by Yahoo!, Microsoft made an unsolicited takeover bid to buy Yahoo! for US$44.6 billion in cash and stock. Days later, Yahoo! considered alternatives to the merger with Microsoft, including a merger with internet giant Google or a potential transaction with News Corp. However, on February 11, 2008, Yahoo! decided to reject Microsoft's offer as "substantially undervaluing" Yahoo!'s brand, audience, investments, and growth prospects. As of February 22, two Detroit based pension companies have sued Yahoo! and their board of directors for breaching their duty to shareholders by opposing Microsoft's takeover bid and pursuing "value destructive" third-party deals. In early March, Google CEO Eric Schmidt went on record saying that he was concerned that a potential Microsoft-Yahoo! merger might hurt the Internet by compromising its openness. The value of Microsoft's cash and stock offer declined with Microsoft's stock price, falling to $42.2 billion by April 4. On April 5, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer sent a letter to Yahoo!'s board of directors stating that if within three weeks they had not accepted the deal, Microsoft would approach shareholders directly in hopes of a electing a new board and moving forward with merger talks; this is known as a hostile takeover. In response, Yahoo! stated on April 7 that they were not against a merger, but that they wanted a better offer.
During a meeting between Ballmer and Yang, Microsoft had offered to raise its offer by $5 billion to $33 per share, while Yahoo! demanded $37. Talks had taken place the previous weekend (June 8), during which Microsoft allegedly told Yahoo that it was no longer interested in a purchase of the entire company at the price offered earlier -- $33/share.
Also on June 12, Yahoo announced a non-exclusive search advertising alliance with Google. Upon this announcement, many executives and senior employees have announced their plans to leave the company as it appears that they have lost confidence in Yahoo's strategies. According to market analysts, these pending departures are also impacting Wall Street's perception of the company.
The majority of the product offerings are available globally in more than 20 languages.
Storing personal information
As of December 11, 2007, Google and the Microsoft's Live Search "store personal information for 18 months" and Yahoo! and AOL (Time Warner) "retain search requests for 13 months".
Communication
Yahoo! provides internet communication services such as Yahoo! Mail and Yahoo! Messenger, Yahoo! Mail is the largest e-mail service in the world with almost half the market share. In March, 2007, Yahoo! announced that their email service will offer unlimited storage beginning May 2007.
Yahoo! Mail premium service MailPlus provides additional functionality including POP/SMTP access to Yahoo! Mail accounts, although such functionality is already provided for free by Yahoo! competitor Gmail. Some MailPlus subscribers have reported difficulties in successfully cancelling their Mailplus (automatically renewed and paid by credit card) subscriptions.
Yahoo! also provides a personalization service, My Yahoo!, which enables users to collect their favorite Yahoo! features, content feeds, and information into a single page.
On March 31, 2008 Yahoo! launched web portal shine.yahoo.com another Yahoo! property dedicated to women between the ages of 25 and 54. With Shine Yahoo! will expand its offerings in parenting, sex and love, healthy living, food, career, money, entertainment, fashion, beauty home life and astrology.
Co-branded Internet services
Yahoo! has developed partnerships with different broadband providers such as AT&T (via BellSouth & SBC), Verizon Communications, Rogers Communications and British Telecom, offering a range of free and premium Yahoo! content and services to subscribers.
Mobile
Yahoo! Mobile includes services for on-the-go messaging, such as email, instant messaging, and moblogging; information, such as search and alerts; and fun and games, including ring tones, mobile games, and Yahoo! Photos for camera phones.
The company's officials stated that in distinction from ordinary Web searches, Yahoo!'s new service presents a list of actual information, which may include: news headlines, images from Yahoo!'s Flickr photos site, business listings, local weather and links to other sites. The list of results is based on calculations that Yahoo! computers make on certain information the user is seeking.
Yahoo! has announced they also plan to adopt Novarra's mobile content transcoding service for the oneSearch platform.
Commerce
Yahoo! offers commerce services such as Yahoo! Shopping, Yahoo! Autos, Yahoo! Real Estate and Yahoo! Travel, which enables users to gather relevant information and make commercial transactions and purchases online.
Yahoo! Publisher Network is an advertising tool for online publishers to place advertisements relevant to their content to monetize their websites.
Yahoo! launched its new Internet advertisement sales system on February 5, 2007 called Panama. The service is scheduled for release in quarter 3 of 2008.
Yahoo! Next
Yahoo! Next is an incubation ground for future Yahoo! technologies currently in their beta testing phase.
With the new search advertising system "Panama" Yahoo! aims to increase revenue generated from search.
Other forms of advertising which bring in revenue for Yahoo! include display and contextual advertising.
Working with comScore, The New York Times found that Yahoo! is able to collect far more data about Web users than its competitors from its Web sites and its advertising network. By one measure, on average Yahoo! had the potential in December 2007 to build a profile of 2,500 records per month about each of its visitors.
Criticism and controversy
Yahoo! paid inclusion controversy
In March 2004, Yahoo! launched a paid inclusion program whereby commercial websites are guaranteed listings on the Yahoo! search engine after payment. This scheme is lucrative, but has proved unpopular both with website marketers (who are reluctant to pay), and the public (who are unhappy about the paid-for listings being indistinguishable from other search results). As of October 2006, Paid Inclusion doesn't guarantee any commercial listing, it only helps the paid inclusion customers, by crawling their site more often and by providing some statistics on the searches that led to the page and some additional smart links (provided by customers as feeds) below the actual url.
Adware and spyware
Yahoo! has also been criticized for funding spyware and adware — advertising from Yahoo!'s clients often appears on-screen in pop-ups generated from adware that a user may have installed on their computer without realizing it by accepting online offers to download software to fix computer clocks or improve computer security, add browser enhancements, etc.
In April 2005, Shi Tao, a journalist working for a Chinese newspaper, was sentenced to 10 years in prison by the Changsha Intermediate People's Court of Hunan Province, China (First trial case no. Police went straight to his offices and picked him up.
In February 2006, Yahoo! General Counsel submitted a statement to the U.S.
He was arrested in September 2002 after Yahoo! assisted Chinese authorities by providing information. As reported in The Washington Post and many media sources:
The suit says that in 2001, Wang was using a Yahoo! e-mail account to post anonymous writings to an Internet mailing list.
The suit alleges that Yahoo!, under pressure from the Chinese government, blocked that account. Even though the official logo is purple, the logo used on the main page yahoo.com is red with a black outline and shadow.