Britannica Money (2024)

Yahoo!, global Internet brand and services provider based in Sunnyvale, California, and owned by Verizon Communications since 2017. It was founded in 1994 by Jerry Yang and David Filo, graduate students at Stanford University in California. Yahoo! provides users with online utilities, information, and access to other websites.

Yahoo!, which includes features such as a search engine, an e-mail service, a directory, and a news branch, began as a simple collection of Yang and Filo’s favourite Web sites. It was initially called “Jerry and David’s Guide to the World Wide Web,” but, as the site grew in popularity, it was renamed Yahoo!, an acronym for “Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle.” Incorporated in 1995, Yahoo! acquired various companies such as Rocketmail and ClassicGames.com, which eventually became Yahoo! Mail and Yahoo! Games, respectively. As one of the major players in the dot-com frenzy of the late 1990s, Yahoo! managed to survive the collapse of many Internet-based companies in 2001–02, but it sustained heavy economic losses.

Yahoo! battled Google—a major competitor in the search engine industry—for many years in an attempt to claim a larger share of the market. Yahoo! notably released its Yahoo! Instant Messenger, bought out the Internet photo network Flickr, included a myriad of other features, and acquired a 40 percent share of the Chinese e-commerce company Alibaba. Despite such moves, many of Yahoo!’s rivals endured. In February 2008 the Microsoft Corporation offered to buy Yahoo! for $44.6 billion, but this proposal was rejected by Yahoo!, and Microsoft then rescinded its offer. However, negotiations between the companies continued, and on July 28, 2009, an agreement was reached in which Yahoo! would use Microsoft’s search engine, Bing, for its Web site and would handle premium advertisem*nts for Microsoft’s Web site, an arrangement scheduled to last for 10 years.

Amid growing financial struggles, Yahoo! hired Marissa Mayer as CEO and president in 2012. Although she had played a key role in the rise of Google, her efforts to turn Yahoo! around had little success. In 2016 it was announced that Verizon Communications would acquire the company’s core assets, notably its Internet operations, for approximately $4.8 billion. However, the closing of the deal was delayed by the public announcement that Yahoo! had been subjected to a series of security breaches, which was said to have affected more than one billion user accounts; it was later revealed that all Yahoo! accounts (approximately three billion) had been compromised. The final sale, which was completed in 2017, was valued at approximately $4.48 billion. Yahoo! subsequently became part of the newly created subsidiary Oath, though it continued to exist as a distinct brand. The portion of Yahoo! that was not sold—notably its interest in Alibaba—was reformed as Altaba.