Yahoo! past and future

Important events

Please note that this list is merely partial.

• January 1994: Jerry Yang and David Filo create "Jerry's Guide to the World Wide Web" while studying at Stanford University.
• April 1994: "Jerry's Guide to the World Wide Web" is re-named "Yahoo!"
• March 1995: Yahoo! is incorporated.
• 1995: Ziff Davis Inc. launches the magazine Yahoo! Internet Life, initially as ZD Internet Life. The magazine was meant to accompany and complement the web site.
• April 12, 1996: Yahoo! has Initial public offering, closing at $33.00, up 270% from the IPO price, after peaking at $43.00 for the day.
• June 8, 1998: Yahoo! aquires Viaweb, co-founded by Paul Graham, which becomes Yahoo! Stores.
• October 12, 1998: Yahoo! aquires direct marketing company Yoyodyne Entertainment, Inc. [7]
• January 28, 1999: Yahoo! aquires Geocities.
• April 1, 1999: Yahoo! aquires Broadcast.com.
• January 3, 2000: Yahoo! stocks close at an all-time high of $475.00 (pre-split price) a share. The day before, it hit an intra-day high of $500.13 (pre-split price).
• January 19, 2000: At the height of the Dot-com tech bubble, 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 yen ($962,140 at that time). [8]
• February 7, 2000: Yahoo.com was brought to a halt for a few hours as it was the victim of a distributed denial of service attack (DDoS). [9] [10]. 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.
• June 28, 2000: Yahoo! aquires eGroups.
• September 26, 2001 Yahoo! stocks close at an all-time low of $8.11. The day before, it hit an intra-day low of $8.02 (both figures are pre-split prices).
• December 27, 2001: Yahoo! aquires HotJobs.
• June 3, 2002: SBC and Yahoo! Launch National Co-Branded Dial Service -- Press Release
• December 2002: Yahoo! Inc. starts acquisition of Inktomi Web search engine
• July, 2003: BT Openworld announces an alliance with Yahoo! -- Press Release
• July 2003, Acquires Overture Services, Inc.
• January 19, 2004: Yahoo! Inc. announces the formation of Yahoo! Research Labs, a research organization focusing on the invention of new technologies and solutions for Yahoo!. Yahoo!'s Head and Principal Scientist, Dr. Gary William Flake, leads the new organization. Dr. Flake has since left the company and now works at Microsoft.
• February 19, 2004: Yahoo! dropped Google-powered results, returning to its own algorithm and index after it had used Google's results for a long time.
• March 2004: Yahoo! launches its own search engine technology.
• March 1, 2004: Yahoo! announces (as cited in the New York Times article listed in the "References" section) that it will practice paid inclusion for its search service. However, it also announced it would continue to rely mainly on a free web crawl for most of its search engine content.
• March 25, 2004: Yahoo! acquires the European shopping search engine Kelkoo.
• July 9, 2004 Yahoo! acquires email provider Oddpost.com [11].
• December 15, 2004: Yahoo! launches beta version of its video search engine.
• February 9, 2005 Yahoo! Launch is changed to Yahoo! Music, which still provides free music.
• February 15, 2005 Yahoo! establishes its European Headquarters in Dublin, Ireland with the creation of 400 new jobs. [12]
• February 28, 2005 Yahoo! launches a developer network giving an API to most of its search verticals.
• March 2, 2005 Yahoo! completes 10 years of corporate existence. Gives out free ice cream coupons at Baskin Robbins to its users to celebrate its "birthday."
• March 20, 2005 Yahoo! acquires photo sharing service Flickr [13]
• March 29, 2005 Yahoo! launch blogging and social networking service Yahoo! 360 [14]
• April 7, 2005 Wikimedia Foundation announces Yahoo! support [15]
• May 26, 2005 Yahoo! announces its new PhotoMail service
• June 14, 2005 Yahoo! acquires VoIP provider DialPad Communications.
• July 15, 2005 Yahoo! announces Yahoo! Research Lab - Berkeley (YRLB)
• July 25, 2005 Yahoo! acquires widget engine Konfabulator
• August 11, 2005 Yahoo! acquires 40% of Alibaba.com for $1 billion US, and Alibaba will take over operation of Yahoo! China. [16]
• August 23, 2005: Verizon and Yahoo! Launch Integrated DSL Service -- Press Release
• September 7, 2005. Yahoo! supplies information to People's Republic of China which then jails reporter Shi Tao, age 37, for 10 years. Yahoo! states that they were following Chinese law. [17]
• October 4, 2005 Yahoo! purchases online social event calendar Upcoming.org. [18]
• October 17, 2005 Yahoo! buys British company Whereonearth Ltd which provides location technology.
• November 15, 2005 The sports section of My Yahoo! is hacked; titles such as "selfhood + conscience" and "aesthetic freedom" link to various pages at doublereflection.org .
• December 1, 2005 - Tivo and Yahoo! form a partnership where several Yahoo! features can be viewed on television via the Series2 TiVO set top box. [19], [20]
• December 8/ (US time) 9, (Australian time) 2005 Yahoo! 7 announced for January 2006. Official Site
• December 9, 2005 Yahoo! acquires del.icio.us.
• January 9, 2006 Yahoo! acquires webjay
• February 12, 2006 Yahoo! Developer Network PHP Center launched.

Yahoo! Research Labs

Yahoo! has 3 research labs:

• Yahoo! Research Berkeley, California in association with the School of Information at the University of California, Berkeley.
• Burbank, California (moved from Pasadena, California in November 2005).
• Sunnyvale, California.

Yahoo! Next

Yahoo! Next is essentially incubation ground for future Yahoo! technologies in their beta testing phase. A chance for the Yahoo! community to interact and have a say, on how upcoming products are designed and fine tuned. Each prototype can be discussed in its own individual Yahoo! Next forum.

This guide is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia.