Logos and themes

The first logo was used when the company was founded in 1995. It was red and had three icons on each side.
The logo used on the main page yahoo.com used to be red with a black outline and shadow, but in May 2009, along with a new theme redesign, the logo was changed to purple with no outline or shadow.
Sometimes, the logo is abbreviated with Y!.
Themes and page designs are different on some international Yahoo! home pages, such as Yahoo! Australia.

Yahoo! International

Yahoo! is known across the world with its multi-lingual interface. The site is available in over 20 languages, including English. The official directory for all of the Yahoo! International sites is world.yahoo.com.
Each of the international sites are wholly-owned by Yahoo!, with the exception of Yahoo! Japan, in which it holds a 34.79% minority stake and Yahoo!7 in Australia which is a 50-50 agreement between Yahoo! and The Seven Network. Historically, Yahoo! entered into joint venture agreements with Softbank for the major European sites (UK, France, Germany) and well as Korea and Japan. In November 2005, Yahoo! purchased the minority interests that Softbank owned in Europe and Korea.
Yahoo! holds a 40% stake in Alibaba, which manages a web portal in China using the Yahoo! brand name. Yahoo! in the USA does not have direct control over the operations of Alibaba, which operates as a completely independent company.
In 2008, Darren Petterson, business development director for Yahoo! Europe confirmed that Yahoo! was going to launch a Romanian version of their website by the end of the year, however, due to the financial crisis at that time, those plans were frozen. In February 2010, new reports appeared in the Romanian media claiming that the portal will finally launch by June the same year, as some services like Yahoo! Mail and Yahoo! Mobile are already translated into Romanian.

Financial data

Financial data, US$ million

Year	2003	2004	2005	2006	2007
Sales	1,625	3,574	5,258	6,426	6,969
EBITDA	453	1,000	1,505	1,066
Net Results	238	840	1,896	751	660
Staff	5,500	7,600	9,800	11,400

 Advertising Revenue

As of January, 2010, Yahoo held the world's largest market share in online display advertising. JP Morgan put the company’s US market share for display ads at 17%, well ahead of No. 2 Microsoft at 11% and AOL at 7%.

Yahoo subject of cyber attacks originating in China

Adobe and Yahoo appear to have been among the targets of cyber attacks originating in China that prompted Google Inc. to threaten to leave the Asian nation in a surprise announcement on January 12, 2010.

Criticism and controversy

Nazi memorabilia controversy

For more details on this topic, see LICRA v. Yahoo!.

In 2000, Yahoo! was taken to court in France by parties seeking to prevent French citizens from purchasing memorabilia relating to the Nazi Party. Yahoo! France had already instituted policies preventing the sale of Nazi memorabilia on its site, and prohibiting Nazi and "Neo-Nazi" based discussions on its message boards, but the parties sought to have Yahoo! introduce censorship technology to block French citizens from accessing similar material on Yahoo! websites in countries where local laws permitted Nazi related auctions/discussions.

 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 program was lucrative for Yahoo!, 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).
Yahoo! discontinued the paid inclusion / search submit program at the end of 2009.

 Adware and spyware

Yahoo! has also been criticized for providing ads via the Yahoo! ad network to companies who display them through spyware and adware which display on-screen pop-ups, generated from adware that a user may have installed on their computer without realizing it, sometimes by accepting online offers to download software to fix computer clocks or improve computer security, add browser enhancements, etc. As an example, users who have allowed their machine to become infected with spyware will see advertising pop-ups generated from advertising distributor Walnut Ventures, who had a direct partnership with Direct Revenue.

 Work in the People's Republic of China

“	While technologically and financially you [Yahoo] are giants, morally you are pygmies	”
—Tom Lantos, chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee (2007)

Yahoo! as well as other search engines, have cooperated with the Chinese government in implementing a system of internet censorship in mainland China.
Unlike Google or Microsoft, which keep confidential records of its users outside mainland China, Yahoo! stated that the company will not protect the privacy and confidentiality of its Chinese customers from the authorities.
Human rights advocates such as Human Rights Watch and media groups such as Reporters Without Borders state that it is "ironic that companies whose existence depends on freedom of information and expression have taken on the role of censor."

 Imprisonment of Chinese dissidents

 Shi Tang

Main article: Shi Tao

In September 2005, Reporters Without Borders reported the following story. 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. 29), for "providing state secrets to foreign entities". The "secrets" were a brief list of censorship orders he sent from a Yahoo! Mail account to the Asia Democracy Forum before the anniversary of the Tiananmen Square Incident.
The verdict as published by the Chinese government stated the following. Shi Tao had sent the email through an anonymous Yahoo! account. Yahoo! Holdings (the Hong Kong subsidiary of Yahoo) told the Chinese government that the IP address used to send the email was registered by the Hunan newspaper that Shi Tao worked for. Police went straight to his offices and picked him up.
In February 2006, Yahoo! General Counsel submitted a statement to the U.S. Congress in which Yahoo! denied knowing the true nature of the case against Shi Tao. In April 2006, Yahoo! Holdings (Hong Kong) was investigated by Hong Kong's Privacy Commissioner for Personal Data.
On June 2, 2006, the union representing journalists in the UK and Ireland (National Union of Journalists) called on its 40,000 members to boycott all Yahoo! Inc. products and services to protest the Internet company's reported actions in China.
In July 2007, evidence surfaced detailing the warrant which the Chinese authorities sent to Yahoo! officials, highlighting "State Secrets" as the charge against Shi Tao. The warrant requests "Email account registration information for huoyan1989@yahoo.com.cn, all login times, corresponding IP addresses, and relevant email content from February 22, 2004, to present." Analyst reports and human rights organizations have said that this evidence directly contradicts Yahoo!'s testimony before the U.S. Congress in February 2006.
Yahoo! contends it must respect the laws of governments in jurisdictions where it is operating.

 Li Zhi

Main article: Li Zhi (dissident)

Criticism of Yahoo! intensified in February 2006 when Reporters Without Borders released Chinese court documents stating that Yahoo! aided Chinese authorities in the case of dissident Li Zhi. In December 2003 Li Zhi was sentenced to 8 years imprisonment for "inciting subversion".

 Sued in US court for outing Chinese dissident Wang Xiaoning

Main article: Wang Xiaoning

Wang Xiaoning is a Chinese dissident from Shenyang who was arrested by authorities of the People's Republic of China for publishing controversial material online.
In 2000 and 2001, Wang, who was an engineer by profession, posted electronic journals in a Yahoo! group calling for democratic reform and an end to single-party rule. He was arrested in September 2002 after Yahoo! assisted Chinese authorities by providing information. In September 2003, Wang was convicted of charges of "incitement to subvert state power" and sentenced to ten years in prison.
On April 18, 2007, Xiaoning's wife Yu Ling sued Yahoo! under human rights laws in federal court in San Francisco, California, United States. Wang Xiaoning is named as a plaintiff in the Yahoo! suit, which was filed with help from the World Organization for Human Rights USA. "Yahoo! is guilty of 'an act of corporate irresponsibility,'" said Morton Sklar, executive director of the group. "Yahoo! had reason to know that if they provided China with identification information that those individuals would be arrested."
Yahoo!'s decision to assist China's authoritarian government came as part of a policy of reconciling its services with the Chinese government's policies. This came after China blocked Yahoo! services for a time. 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. Wang set up a new account via Yahoo! and began sending material again; the suit alleges that Yahoo! gave the government information that allowed it to identify and arrest Wang in September 2002. The suit says prosecutors in the Chinese courts cited Yahoo!'s cooperation.

Human rights organizations groups are basing their case on a 217-year-old U.S. law to punish corporations for human rights violations abroad, an effort the Bush administration has opposed:

In recent years, activists working with overseas plaintiffs have sued roughly two dozen businesses under the Alien Tort Statute, which the activists say grants jurisdiction to American courts over acts abroad that violate international norms. Written by the Founding Fathers in 1789 for a different purpose, the law was rarely invoked until the 1980s.

On August 28, 2007, the World Organization for Human Rights sued Yahoo! for allegedly passing information (email and IP address) with the Chinese government that caused the arrests of writers and dissidents. The lawsuit was filed in San Francisco for journalists Shi Tao and Wang Xiaoning. Yahoo! stated that it supported privacy and free expression for it worked with other technology companies to solve human rights concerns.
On November 6, 2007, the US congressional panel criticized Yahoo! for not giving full details to the House Foreign Affairs Committee the previous year, stating it had been "at best inexcusably negligent" and at worst "deceptive".

 Chatrooms and message boards

As a result of media scrutiny relating to Internet child predators and a lack of significant ad revenues, Yahoo!'s "user created" chatrooms were closed down in June 2005. Yahoo! News' message board section was closed December 19, 2006, due to the trolling phenomenon.
In 2009, it was discovered that Yahoo!'s message boards were prone to a vulnerability that allowed board participants to execute JavaScript on reader's computers as they searched the boards. Using this cross-site scripting bug, one could also grab a user's Yahoo! cookie, which could then be used to impersonate them online, even without their Yahoo! password. Yahoo! fixed the vulnerability in September 2009.

 Image search

On May 25, 2006, Yahoo!'s image search was criticized for bringing up sexually explicit images even when SafeSearch was on. This was discovered by a teacher who was intending to use the service with a class to search for "www". Yahoo!'s response to this was, "Yahoo! is aware of this issue and is working to resolve it as quickly as possible".

 Shark finning controversy

Yahoo! is a 40% owner of Alibaba, which facilitates the sale of shark-derived products. After investing in Alibaba, Yahoo! executives were asked about this issue, and responded: "We know the sale of shark products is both legal in Asia and a centuries-old tradition. This issue is largely a cultural-practices one." As a minority-owner of Alibaba, Yahoo! is not able to directly control that company's actions in China.

 User privacy

On November 30, 2009, Yahoo! was criticized by the Electronic Frontier Foundation for sending a DMCA notice to whistle-blower website "Cryptome" for publicly posting Yahoo!'s "Compliance Guide for Law Enforcement", which details prices and procedures on obtaining private information pertaining to Yahoo!'s subscribers.

 Yahoo subject of cyber attacks originating in China

Adobe and Yahoo appear to have been among the targets of cyber attacks originating in China that prompted Google Inc. to threaten to leave the Asian nation in a surprise announcement on January 12, 2010.

Revenue model

About 88% of total revenues for the fiscal year 2009 came from marketing services. The largest segment of it comes from search advertising, where advertisers bid for search terms to display their ads on the search results, on average Yahoo! makes 2.5 cents to 3 cents from each search. 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.

Products and services

Yahoo! operates the web portal http://www.yahoo.com which provides content including the latest news, entertainment, and sports information. The portal also gives users access to other Yahoo! services like Yahoo! Mail, Yahoo! Maps, Yahoo! Finance, Yahoo! Groups and Yahoo! Messenger.

 Storing personal information and tracking usage

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.
As of May 22, 2008, An article in computer world states that Yahoo has a 2-petabyte, specially built data warehouse, which it uses to analyze the behavior of its half-billion Web visitors per month, processing 24 billion events a day. Yahoo Claimed it is expected to grow in multiples of 10 petabytes by 2009 and that this database is the largest in the world. In contrast the internal revenue services database of all taxpayers weighs in at only 150 TB.
As of December 18, 2008, Yahoo! retains search requests for a period of 13 months. However, In response to European Regulators Yahoo scrambles the last eight digits of a users IP address after three months, rendering them partially anonymous.

 Communication

Yahoo! provides Internet communication services such as Yahoo! Messenger and Yahoo! Mail. In March 2007, Yahoo! announced that their e-mail service would offer unlimited storage beginning May 2007.
Yahoo! also offers social networking services and user-generated content in products such as My Web, Yahoo! Personals, Yahoo! 360°, Delicious, Flickr and Yahoo! Buzz. In December 2010, reports emerged that Yahoo! would be shutting down Yahoo Buzz, MyBlogLog, Delicious and a handful of other products.
Yahoo! Photos was shut down on September 20, 2007, in favor of Flickr. On October 16, 2007, Yahoo! announced that they would no longer provide support or perform bug fixes on Yahoo! 360° as they intended to abandon it in early 2008 in favor of a "universal profile" that will be similar to their Mash experimental system.

 Content

Yahoo! partners with numerous content providers in products such as Yahoo! Sports, Yahoo! Finance, Yahoo! Music, Yahoo! Movies, Yahoo! News, Yahoo! Answers and Yahoo! Games to provide media content and news. Yahoo! also provides a personalization service, My Yahoo!, which enables users to combine their favorite Yahoo! features, content feeds and information onto a single page.
On March 31, 2008, Yahoo! launched Shine, a site tailored for women seeking online information and advice between the ages of 25 and 54.

 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.^{[specify][vague]}

 Mobile Services

Yahoo! Mobile offers services for on-the-go messaging, such as email, instant messaging and mobile blogging; information services, search and alerts; entertainment, ring tones, and Yahoo! Photos for camera phones.
Yahoo! also introduced its Internet search system, called oneSearch, developed for mobile phones on March 20, 2007. 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. Instead of showing only, for example, popular movies or some critical reviews, oneSearch lists local theaters that at the moment are playing a certain movie, user ratings and news headlines regarding the movie. A zip code or city name is required for Yahoo! oneSearch to start delivering local search results.
The results of a Web search are listed on a single page and are prioritized into categories. The list of results is based on calculations that Yahoo! computers make on certain information the user is seeking.
Yahoo! uses Novarra's mobile content transcoding service for the oneSearch platform.
On October 8, 2010, Yahoo! announced plans to brings video chat to iPhones and Android-based phones via its popular Yahoo Messenger instant messaging service.

 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! Auctions were discontinued in 2007 except for Asia.

 Small business

The Small Business homepage as of August 2010

Yahoo! provides services such as Yahoo! Domains, Yahoo! Web Hosting, Yahoo! Merchant Solutions, Yahoo! Business Email and Yahoo! Store to small business owners and professionals allowing them to build their own online stores using Yahoo!'s tools.
Yahoo! also offers HotJobs to help recruiters find the talent they seek.

 Advertising

Yahoo! Search Marketing provides services such as Sponsored Search, Local Advertising, and Product/Travel/Directory Submit that let different businesses advertise their products and services on the Yahoo! network. 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. It allows advertisers to bid for search terms based on their popularity to display their ads on search results pages. The system takes bids, ad quality, click-through rates and other factors into consideration in determining how ads are ranked on search results pages. Through Panama, Yahoo! aims to provide more relevant search results to users, a better overall experience, as well as increase monetization—to earn more from the ads it shows.
On April 7, 2008, Yahoo! announced APT from Yahoo!, which was originally called AMP! from Yahoo!, an online advertising management platform. The platform seeks to simplify advertising sales by unifying buyer and seller markets. The service was launched in September 2008.

 Yahoo! Next

Yahoo! Next is an incubation ground for future Yahoo! technologies currently in their beta testing phase. It contains forums for Yahoo! users to give feedback to assist in the development of these future Yahoo! technologies. It was created by Jerry Page and David Shin.

 Yahoo! BOSS

Yahoo! Search BOSS is a service that allows developers to build search applications based on Yahoo!'s search technology. Early Partners in the program include Hakia, Me.dium, Delver, Daylife and Yebol. On October 8, 2010, The Yahoo Search Blog announced BOSS is switching, as expected, to a paid model. They will charge on a cost-per-query model where the price will vary from $0.40 to $0.75 CPM (cost per 1000 BOSS queries). The price, as Yahoo explained, will depend on if you are querying web, image, news or other information. Yahoo said they plan on offering BOSS v1, the free version, for free 60 days after BOSS v2, the paid version, is launched – which is expected in early 2011.

 Yahoo! Meme

Yahoo! Meme is a beta social service, similar to the popular social networking sites Twitter and Jaiku.

 Yahoo! Koprol

Yahoo! Koprol is a Indonesian social networking based on location like GPS without any GPS devices.

 Y!Connect

Y!Connect is a feature that enables individuals to leave comments in online publication boards by using their Yahoo ID, instead of having to register with each individual publication. The Wall Street Journal reported that Yahoo plans to mimic this strategy used by rival Facebook Inc. to help drive traffic to its site.

 Closed down services

Main article: List of Yahoo!-owned sites and services#Closed/defunct services

Geocities was a popular web hosting service founded in 1994. At one point it was the 3rd most-browsed site on the World Wide Web. Yahoo! purchased Geocities in 1999. Ten years later Yahoo! closed Geocities, deleting millions of web pages in the process. A great deal of information was certainly lost but many of those sites & pages have been mirrored at the Internet Archive, "OOcities.com", and more.
Yahoo! 360° was a popular blogging/social networking beta service launched in March 2005 by Yahoo! and closed on July 13, 2009.
Yahoo! Mash beta was another social service closed after one year of operation prior to leaving beta status.
Yahoo! Photos was shut down on September 20, 2007, in favor of integration with Flickr.
Yahoo! Tech was a web site that provided product information and setup advice to users. Yahoo! launched the web site in May 2006. On March 11, 2010, Yahoo! closed down the service and redirected users to Yahoo!'s technology news section.
Other discontinued services include Farechase, My Web, Audio Search, Pets, Live, Kickstart, Briefcase, and Yahoo! for Teachers.

 Twitter slide leak on upcoming changes to Yahoo

On December 15th, 2010, one day after Yahoo announced layoffs of 4% of its workers across their portfolio, MyBlogLog founder Eric Marcoullier posted a slide from a Yahoo Employee on Twitter. The slide was visible during a employee-only strategy webcast indicating changes in Yahoo's offerings.
The following services were in a column under "Sunset": Yahoo Picks, Altavista, MyM, AllTheWeb, Yahoo Bookmarks, Yahoo Buzz, del.icio.us, and MyBlogLog. Under "Merge" was: Upcoming, FoxyTunes, Yahoo Events, Yahoo People Search, Sideline, and FireEagle.
11 other properties were listed that Yahoo was interested in developing into feature sites within the portal to take the place of the "Sunset" and "Merge" vacancies, including the prior feature services (before the New Yahoo Mail was launched), were Yahoo Address Book, Calendar, and Notepad. Yahoo's Chief Product Officer and Executive Vice President Blake Irving unofficially responded to the tweet implying that whoever sent him that particular slide is fired.
The blog on del.icio.us released a post by Chris Yeh after the leak, detailing that "Sunset" in their case doesn't necessarily mean they are closing down, and that other possibilities including Delicious leaving Yahoo (through sale or spinoff) are still on the table and that Delicious will not be closing down at this time; "We can only imagine how upsetting the news coverage over the past 24 hours has been to many of you. Speaking for our team, we were very disappointed by the way that this appeared in the press."

History and growth

In January 1994, 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". David and Jerry's Guide to the World Wide Web was a directory of other web sites, 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!". The yahoo.com domain was created on January 18, 1995.
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 (adjusted for splits).
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. Carol Bartz replaced cofounder Jerry Yang in January 2009

Yahoo!

Yahoo! Inc.

Type	Public (NASDAQ: YHOO)
Industry	Internet, Computer software
Founded	Santa Clara, California (March 1, 1995)
Founder(s)	Jerry Yang David Filo
Headquarters	701 First Ave. Sunnyvale, California, United States
Area served	Worldwide
Key people	Carol Bartz (CEO) Roy J. Bostock (Chairman) Jerry Yang (Co-founder) David Filo (Co-founder)
Products	See list of Yahoo products.
Revenue	$6.460 billion (2009)
Operating income	$3.589 billion (2009)
Profit	$597.99 million (2009)
Total assets	$14.936 billion (2009)
Total equity	$12.493 billion (2009)
Employees	13,600 (Q4 2010)
Subsidiaries	List of acquisitions by Yahoo!
Website	Yahoo.com

Yahoo! Inc. (NASDAQ: YHOO) is an American public corporation with headquarters in Sunnyvale, California, (in Silicon Valley), that provides services via the Internet worldwide. 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.
Yahoo! 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 chairperson of Autodesk, as its new chief executive officer and a member of the board of directors.