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
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
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."
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