Yahoo! homepage

Yahoo! headquarters in Sunnyvale

Security checkpoint at entrance to headquarters parking lot.

Yahoo! started out as "Jerry's Guide to the World Wide Web" but eventually received a new moniker with the help of a dictionary. "Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle" is a backronym for "yahoo!", but Filo and Yang insist they selected the name because they liked the word's general definition, as in Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift: "rude, unsophisticated, uncouth."[1] (For this reason the word "Yahoo!" should be pronounced with the emphasis on the first syllable.) Yahoo! itself first resided on Yang's student workstation, "Akebono," while the software was lodged on Filo's computer, "Konishiki"—both named after legendary sumo wrestlers. The "yet another" phrasing goes back at least to the Unix utility yacc, whose name is an acronym for "yet another compiler compiler".

Yahoo! had its initial public offering on April 12, 1996, raising $33.8 million dollars, by selling 2.6 million shares at $13 each.

As Yahoo!'s popularity has increased, so has the range of features it offers, making it a kind of one-stop shop for all the popular activities of the Internet. These now include: Yahoo! Mail, a Web-based e-mail service, an instant messaging client, a very popular mailing list service (Yahoo! Groups), online gaming and chat, various news and information portals, online shopping and auction facilities. Many of these are based at least in part on previously independent services, which Yahoo! has acquired - such as the popular GeoCities free Web-hosting service, Rocketmail, and various competing mailing list providers such as eGroups. Many of these take-overs were controversial and unpopular with users of the existing services, as Yahoo! often changed the relevant terms of service. An example of this would be their claiming intellectual property rights for the content on their servers, which the original companies had not done.

At the pinnacle of the Internet boom in the year 2000, the cable news station CNBC reported that Yahoo! Inc. and eBay were in discussions to initiate a 50/50 merger [2].

Yahoo! has partnerships with telecommunications and Internet providers - such as BT in the UK, Rogers in Canada and SBC ,Verizon [3]and BellSouth in the US - to create content-rich broadband services to rival those offered by AOL. The company offers a branded credit card, Yahoo! Visa, through a partnership with First USA.

Beginning in late 2002, Yahoo! began to bolster its search services by acquiring relevant companies. In December 2002, Yahoo! acquired Inktomi, and in July 2003, it acquired Overture Services, Inc. and its subsidiaries AltaVista and AlltheWeb. On February 18, 2004, Yahoo! dropped Google-powered results and returned to using its own technology to provide search results.

As of 2005 Yahoo!'s news message boards have gained something of a cult following. Attached to every story is a discussion board, yet rarely are the posts pertinent to the story. Often, the posts are deliberately outrageous, attempting to provoke angry responses which, in turn, lead to more offensive posts and so on. No news story, however sacrosanct, is spared.

In June 2005 Yahoo! acquired blo.gs, a service based on RSS feed aggregation, primarily from weblogs (hence the name), which produces a simple list (and also an RSS feed thereof) of freshly updated Weblogs, ordered according to recentness of update. blo.gs was the first Internet company hosted on a domain hack Yahoo! acquired, del.icio.us being the second.

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

The Yahoo! Holdings controversy

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". He had passed details of a censorship order to the Asia Democracy Forum and the website Democracy News. Reporters Without Borders (RSF) investigated the case, specifically the ease with which Mr Shi had been caught. He had sent the message through an anonymous Yahoo! account. But police had gone straight to his offices and picked him up. RSF later obtained a translation of the verdict which stated that Mr Shi's account information, telephone number and address were "furnished by Yahoo! Holdings".

Criticism of Yahoo! intensified when Reporters Without Borders claimed translated court documents proved the company aided Chinese authorities in the case of dissident Li Zhi. In December 2003 Li Zhi was sentenced to 8 years imprisonment for "inciting subversion".

In recent months Yahoo! has also followed the directive of United States government officials in turning over information which the United States deems as key for continuing its global war on terror. Yahoo! contends it must respect the laws of governments in jurisdictions where it is operating.

Mail certification

In February 2006, Yahoo! also announced their decision (along with AOL) to give users the option to "certify" outgoing mail. That is, by paying up to one cent for each outgoing mail, allowing the mail in question to avoid spam filters. This decision is opposed by people that claim it to be a "tax on speech", which would eventually restrict freedom of speech as companies implementing similar decision would be tempted to increase the amount of mail classified as spam in order to encourage users to pay, preventing non-profit organizations to freely communicate with their members, among other things. However a large number of non-profit organisations, such as the Red Cross have signed up to the program.

Yahoo! Mail user name bans

On February 20, 2006, it was revealed that Yahoo! Mail is banning the word "allah" in e-mail user names, both separate and as part of a user name such as linda.callahan. [4] Surprisingly, other religiously loaded words such as "jesus", "mohammad", and even "satan" are not banned. Neither are many other offensive words. [5] Since Yahoo! is giving the impression they are selectively banning this particular word for "God" frequently used by Arabs among muslims, christians, and jews, along with "osama" among few other banned words, they have been raising voices about generalizing Arabs to be terrorists [6]. Shortly after the news of the "allah" ban became widespread in media, it was lifted in February 23, 2006. Along with this action, Yahoo! also spoke up on this issue:

"We continuously evaluate abuse patterns in registration usernames to help prevent spam, fraud and other inappropriate behavior. A small number of people registered for IDs using specific terms with the sole purpose of promoting hate, and then used those IDs to post content that was harmful or threatening to others, thus violating Yahoo!'s Terms of Service.

'Allah' was one word being used for these purposes, with instances tied to defamatory language. We took steps to help protect our users by prohibiting use of the term in Yahoo! usernames. We recently re-evaluated the term 'Allah' and users can now register for IDs with this word because it is no longer a significant target for abuse. We regularly evaluate this type of activity and will continue to make adjustments to our registration process to help foster a positive customer experience."

Chatrooms and message boards

Due to fears of preying on underage children, the Yahoo! "user created" chatrooms were closed down in 2005. However, Yahoo!'s messsage boards were not, as they are notorious for open trolling, flaming, racism, and general rudeness. The message boards are self-moderated; the only official channel for involving Yahoo! personnel is through a complaint form which seems to have limited utility.

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

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.

As with all popular websites that provide message forums for its users, the Internet portal Yahoo! is the frequent target of Internet trolls. However, because the site does not target a specific audience, unlike other popular websites such as Slashdot, Yahoo! encourages input from a diverse cross-section of both the United States and the world. This environment has fostered a unique and distinctive trolling culture all of its own.

Although Yahoo! Inc. maintains non-US versions of Yahoo!, such as http://www.yahoo.co.uk (Yahoo! UK & Ireland), http://www.yahoo.de (Yahoo! Deutschland), and http://www.yahoo.ca (Yahoo! Canada) the following trolling phenomena mostly apply to Yahoo.com, the US site, as it receives the greatest amount of visitors and, therefore, the greatest exposure.

Yahoo! provides two types of message boards for public use. One set is organized into a topical hierarchy, and is located at http://messages.yahoo.com/index.html. The other message boards are for Yahoo! News articles. Yahoo! News does not carry original content; it publishes stories written by the Associated Press, AFP, Reuters, and various newspapers. Every article on Yahoo! News has an associated message board (Except for articles that fall into the sports or entertainment category) where users can discuss the content; there is a link for that article's particular board at the bottom of every article, and thus these message boards have substantial visibility. In 2005, Yahoo! changed the message board link from a prominent box offering users to post their responses to a smaller link simply labelled "Discuss." Although Yahoo! provides its users with many avenues to access news articles, the most popular message boards - and the ones almost exclusively affected by trolls - are the ones for news stories that appear on the Yahoo! front page.

Although the boards do not require registration to read, a Yahoo! ID is required in order to post. This is a weak deterrent against trolling, however, as ID's are free and do not require e-mail confirmation. Yahoo! also warns users on every post they submit that "Although your IP address is not displayed on your post, Yahoo! does record your yahoo_id...and your IP address" and "Messages that are unlawful, harmful, threatening, abusive, harassing, tortious, defamatory, vulgar, obscene, libelous, invasive of another's privacy, hateful, or racially, ethnically or otherwise objectionable may be removed and may result in the loss of your Yahoo! ID." These warnings are also weak deterrents, however, as there is no prohibition on a single user owning several Yahoo! ID accounts.

Users do have the power to report posts which violate Yahoo!'s terms of service, but, in virtually all cases, the worst that appears to happen to the alleged perpetrator is a temporary "lockout" from posting immediately after being reported. This lockout lasts for a few minutes, and dedicated trolls familiar with the Yahoo! modus operandi circumvent this by creating multiple ID's, often identifiable by other users as the same offending troll - a typical series might be ATrollsYahooID, ATrollsYahooID1, ATrollsYahooID2, and so forth. Few, if any, reports result in anything substantive, even so much as a deletion of a post, let alone the banning of a user. Once in a while reporters will make their actions known by posting repeated messages on Yahoo! news messageboards warning would-be trollers that trolling behaviours are being reported. However, reporters will often find that their attempts to police and muzzle the trolls are often overcome by the sheer number of trolls inhabiting the boards.

Links

• Trollwars forum

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

AT&T Yahoo! logo

AT&T Yahoo! is an information service from SBC Internet Services. It is a partnership between AT&T, Inc. and Yahoo! Inc. to provide co-branded dial-up and DSL Internet service.

From 2003 to January 1, 2006 the ISP was known as SBC Yahoo! DSL; due to the SBC and AT&T merger, its name was changed.

Other ISPs owned by AT&T include Prodigy, whose customers were urged to migrate to the SBC Yahoo! service, and AT&T WorldNet, which still exists after the SBC/AT&T merger to serve customers not in SBC's existing service areas. AT&T also used to provide broadband Internet through cable under its AT&T Broadband division; that division was sold to Comcast in 2002.

Yahoo! also provides Internet service with other companies besides AT&T, such as Verizon and Rogers Communications in Canada as Verizon Yahoo! and Rogers Yahoo!, with BT Yahoo! in the UK for BT Group respectively.

As of April 2008 the partnership between AT&T and Yahoo! has ended. The new term for the former AT&T Yahoo! Internet is AT&T High Speed Internet.

Links

• Info and Ordering page
• SBC's Website
• Yahoo!'s Website

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

Yahoo! Internet Life was a monthly magazine published by Ziff-Davis, which licensed the name from Yahoo!, a well known search engine website.

It dealt with the emerging Internet and computer culture of the late 1990s and early 2000s. It folded on July 2, 2002.

The magazine featured a regular column by film-critic Roger Ebert and had many reviews of various kinds of webpages and tech gadgets.

Links

• CNET story announcing the magazine closure

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

Yahoo! Japan Corporation (ヤフー株式会社, Yafū Kabushiki-gaisha^?) (TYO: 4689 ) is a Japanese affiliate of Yahoo!. The head office is in the Roppongi Hills Mori Tower in Minato, Tokyo. The largest stockholder is SoftBank.

The naming rights of Fukuoka Dome were acquired in 2005, the dome subsequently being known as "Fukuoka Yahoo! Japan Dome".

Links

• Yahoo! Japan

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

Founded: 2005
Founder: Yahoo! and Seven Network
Owner: Yahoo! and Seven Network
Category: Internet portal
Spoken language: English
URL: http://www.yahoo7.com.au/

Yahoo!7 is a partnership between Yahoo! Inc. and Australia's Seven Network which was launched on 30th of January 2006.

The companies announced in December 2005 that they will combine their online, mobile and IPTV businesses in Australia and New Zealand.

Following a deal with m.Net Corporation Ltd in July 2005, the new corporation looks well set to produce mobile content.

Promotional slogans

• Guess Who's Been Cozying up to Whom?
• They're Getting Hitched. And you're invited.
• Why not tag along for the honeymoon?
• It's a match made in heaven that you just gotta love.

Links

• Yahoo!7
• Press Release from Yahoo Inc.
• SevenCorporate.com.au Press Releases

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

AlltheWeb is a major search engine. It was debuted in mid-1999 introduced by Fast Search and Transfer and used primarily as a show piece site. Fast started their search engine in 1997. Although rivalling Google in size and technology, AlltheWeb never became as popular.

AlltheWeb in fact had a few advantages over Google, such as a fresher database, more advanced search features, search clustering and a completely customizable look. In February 2003 Fast's web search division was bought by Overture. In March 2004 Overture itself was taken over by Yahoo!. Shortly after Yahoo!'s acquisition, the AlltheWeb site started using Yahoo!'s database and some of the advanced features were removed, such as FTP search.

When AlltheWeb started in 1999, Fast Search and Transfer aimed to provide their database to other search engines, copying the successful case of Inktomi. Indeed, in January 2000, Lycos used their results in the Lycos PRO search. By that time, the AlltheWeb database grew from 80 million URIs to 200 million. Their aim was to index all the publicly-accessible web. Their crawler indexed over 2 billion pages by June 2002 and started a fresh round of the search engine size war. Before their purchase by Yahoo!, the database contained about 3.3 billion URIs.

AlltheWeb is famed for giving Google a run for its money. It often overtook Google in terms of the number of pages indexed, only to be outdone by the latter in a matter of a few days. Alltheweb is also famous for its simple page layout. One of the major problems with AlltheWeb is that it often throws up multiple links to different pages of the same site.

Link

• AlltheWeb

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

The name AltaVista refers both to an Internet search engine company and to that company's search engine product.

The engine, whose name means "a view from above" or "high view", originated in 1995 with Paul Flaherty (died March 16, 2006 at 42) and scientists at Digital Equipment Corporation's Research lab in Palo Alto, California, and was intended to showcase the speed of the company's Alpha servers. It was for that reason originally launched at altavista.digital.com.

They devised a method to store every word of every HTML page on the Internet in a fast, searchable index. This led to AltaVista's development of the first searchable, full-text database of a large part of the World Wide Web.

The company's product BabelFish offered the Web's first Internet machine translation service that could translate words, phrases or entire Web sites to and from English, Spanish, French, German, Portuguese, Italian and Russian. Babelfish is still one of the most popular free translation tools online.

Early AltaVista site header.

The search engine went online in 1995 and soon surpassed Lycos and Excite in popularity. It was the first-ever multi-lingual search engine. It was also the first major search engine to support non-Latin languages, such as Japanese or Chinese. AltaVista later extended this by introducing localized portals in many countries.

AltaVista pioneered a number of common search features, such as searching for phrases using quotes. The multimedia search was for many years the largest available, as was the database of indexed URIs. AltaVista was rated as the largest search engine in 1995, and again between 1997 and 1999[1]. Before its switch to the Yahoo! database, AltaVista had about 1 billion indexed URIs.

In 1996, AltaVista became the exclusive provider of search results for Yahoo!. In 1998, Digital was sold to Compaq, and in 1999 Compaq relaunched AltaVista as a web portal, abandoning their streamlined searchpage and alienating their core userbase. In June of the same year, Compaq paid US$3.3 million for the domain name altavista.com, but it continued to lose marketshare, especially to Google. It was subsequently floated from Compaq as an independent company.

In February 2003, AltaVista was bought by Overture Services, Inc. The failed attempt at a "portal" was dropped and the website was again revamped to provide simple search functions. In March 2004, Overture itself was taken over by Yahoo!. Shortly after Yahoo!'s acquisition, the AltaVista site started using the Yahoo! Search database.

AltaVista was also one of the numerous websites which promised "free email for life", only to subsequently reverse this policy by charging a subscription fee for its email services.

Links

• AltaVista
• Babel Fish
• Timeline

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

Broadcast.com was a web radio company founded as "AudioNet" in 1995 by Mark Cuban and Todd Wagner.

The company had inauspicious beginnings, as a desire by co-founder Mark Cuban to hear the basketball games of his alma mater, Indiana University. The initial setup involved picking up signals from Dallas radio station, KLIF in Cuban's bedroom and broadcasting them to home computers via the Internet.

As the company grew, AudioNet expanded from mainly broadcasting sporting events to broadcasting presidential conventions and many other events.

In May of 1998, AudioNet renamed itself Broadcast.com and on July 17, 1998, Broadcast.com had their initial public offering, setting (at the time) a one-day record for IPOs by rising almost 350% percent from its opening price. The stock closed up at $62.75 per share from their initial trading at $18 per share.

The record IPO made instant financial successes out of the company's employees through stock options, making 300 employees millionaires and founders Cuban and Wagner billionaires.

In April 1999, Broadcast.com was acquired by Yahoo! for $5.7 billion in stock and became Yahoo! Broadcast Solutions. Over the next few years Yahoo! split the services previously offered by Broadcast.com into separate services, Yahoo! Launchcast for music and Yahoo! Platinum for video entertainment. Yahoo! Platinum has since been discontinued, its functionality being offered as part of two pay services, SBC Yahoo! DSL and Yahoo! Plus.

As of 2006, neither broadcast.com nor broadcast.yahoo.com are distinct web addresses; both simply redirect to yahoo.com.

Link

• http://broadcast.yahoo.com/

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

Delicious (formerly del.icio.us, pronounced "delicious") is a social bookmarking, social software web service for storing and sharing web bookmarks. The site came online in late 2003 and was developed by Joshua Schachter, co-maintainer of Memepool.

Everything posted to delicious.com is publicly viewable by default, although a user can mark specific bookmarks as private, and mass-imported bookmarks are private by default. The public aspect is emphasized; it is not intended to be a tool for storing private bookmark collections. Many people use delicious.com to publish "linkblogs" on their weblogs.

A non-hierarchical keyword categorization system is used on delicious.com where users can tag each of their bookmarks with a number of freely chosen keywords (cf. folksonomy). A combined view of everyone's bookmarks with a given tag is available; Its collective nature also makes it possible to view bookmarks added by similar-minded users.

The emphasis on recent additions makes it a convenient mechanism for propagating internet memes and trends.

Simple HTML interface with human readable URLs, as well as a REST API and RSS feeds for web syndication are used on delicious.com.

Use of the service is currently free. The source code of the site is not available, but a user's own entered data is freely downloadable through the API.

The website has an unconventional domain name, known as a domain hack, which may have contributed to its popularity. It was the second Internet company hosted on a domain hack that Yahoo! acquired, blo.gs being the first.

The websites de.lirio.us, del.not.us and sa.bros.us are open source clones of del.icio.us. There are a number of innovations around social bookmarks beyond simple urls. Flickr bookmarks pictures, YouTube bookmarks videos, and Digg bookmarks news.

Yahoo! acquired del.icio.us on Friday, December 9, 2005.

Sample queries

View recent entries:

• http://delicious.com/recent

View today's popular entries:

• http://delicious.com/popular

View popular tags:

• http://delicious.com/tag

Find any url that is tagged with "Nanotechnology":

• http://delicious.com/tag/Nanotechnology

Combine tags. Find any url that is tagged with both "Nanotechnology" and "Fabrication":

• http://delicious.com/tag/Nanotechnology+Fabrication

Find entries with a certain media type:

• http://delicious.com/tag/system:media:video

Find the history of how a url has been tagged:

• http://delicious.com/url?url=http://wikipedia.org/

<h2>See also</h2>

• <!--LINK 31--> - the method of organization that delicious.com uses.
• <!--LINK 32--> - the service that delicious.com offers
• <!--LINK 33--> - developer of delicious.com
• <!--LINK 34--> - acquirer of delicious.com

<h2>External links</h2>

<h3>Official sites</h3>See also

• folksonomy - the method of organization that delicious.com uses.
• social bookmarking - the service that delicious.com offers
• Joshua Schachter - developer of delicious.com
• Yahoo! - acquirer of del.icio.us

Links

Official sites

• delicious.com
• delicious.com blog
• delicious.com e-mail discussion archives

Alternate delicious.com interfaces

• skin.delicious.com - A delicious.com skin for Firefox.
• Simplifying delicious.com - A simplified posting interface for delicious.com.
• delicious.com direc.tor: Delivering A High-Performance AJAX Web Service Broker.
• Expialidocio.us uses the OpenLaszlo platform and the delicious.com API to display posting histograms and time-specific tag clouds.
• Revealicious - A set of graphic visualisations for your delicious.com account.
• Delicious Soup - A tool that reveals your delicious.com activities.
• browse.delicious - A visual browser to explore and experience the delicious.com community network.
• thumblicio.us - browse delicious.com using thumbnails.
• delicious.com most popular treemap
• populicio.us - delicious.com popular sites.
• LiveMarks - Popular delicious.com bookmarks dynamically loaded real-time.
• trendalicious - a near real-time view of website popularity trends in delicious.com.
• CollaborativeRank - A delicious.com search engine.
• Facetious - Allows you to search at the crossing of several tags
• Cocoalicious - A Cocoa delicious.com Client for Mac OS X.
• Pukka - A lightweight Cocoa delicious.com Client for Mac OS X.

delicious.com utilities

Web utilities

• GROU.PS - Share your delicious.com bookmarks. Combine them with Digg, reddit and other popuplar service providers.

Firefox/Netscape utilities

• delicious.com toolbar for Firefox
• Foxylicious - A Firefox extension that syncs your delicious.com bookmarks into your browser bookmarks.
• delicious.com loader loads your Firefox bookmarks directly into your delicious.com account.
• delicious.com import script imports a Netscape/Firefox bookmark file into delicious.com.

Internet Explorer utilities

• Internet Explorer Active Channel automatically imports your tags to Internet Explorer's favorites.

Safari utilities

• delicious2safari - Import your delicious.com bookmarks into Safari.
• Safarilicious - Export your Safari Bookmarks To delicious.com.

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

Flickr is a digital photo sharing website and web services suite.

In addition to being a popular Web site for users to share personal photographs, the service is widely used by bloggers as a photo repository. Its popularity has been fueled by its innovative community tools that allow photos to be tagged and browsed by folksonomic means.

History

Flickr was developed by Ludicorp, a Vancouver, Canada-based company founded in 2002. Ludicorp launched Flickr in February 2004. The service emerged out of tools originally created for Ludicorp's Game Neverending, a web-based massively multiplayer online game. Flickr proved a more feasible project and ultimately Game Neverending was shelved.

Early incarnations of Flickr focused on a multiuser chat room called FlickrLive for sharing photos; the successive evolutions focused more on the uploading and filing backend for individual users and the chat room was buried in the site map. It has since been removed due to a security breach that arose in which users could delete other people's photos without their permission.

In March 2005, Yahoo! Inc. acquired Ludicorp and Flickr. During the week of June 28 all content was migrated from servers in Canada to servers in the United States, resulting in all data being subject to United States federal law. ^[1].

On May 16, 2006, Flickr updated its services from beta to "gamma", along with a design and structural overhaul. According to the site's FAQ, the term "gamma", rarely used in software development, is intended to be tongue-in-cheek to indicate that the service is always being tested by its users, and is in a state of perpetual improvement. A further connotation, more specific to photography and the display of images, is that of gamma correction. For all intents and purposes, the current service is considered a stable release.

In December 2006, upload limits on free accounts were increased to 100MB a month (from 20MB) and were removed from Pro Accounts, permitting unlimited uploads for holders of these accounts (originally a 2GB per month limit).

In January 2007, Flickr announced that "Old Skool" members—those who had joined before the Yahoo acquisition—would be required to associate their account with a Yahoo ID by March 15 to continue using the service. This move was criticized by some users.

On April 9, 2008, Flickr began to allow paid subscribers to upload videos, limited to 90 seconds in length and 150MB in size. On March 2, 2009, Flickr added the ability to upload and view HD videos, and began allowing free users to upload normal-resolution video. At the same time, the set limit for free accounts was lifted.

In May 2009, White House official photographer Pete Souza began using Flickr as a conduit for releasing White House photos. The photos were initially posted with a Creative Commons Attribution license requiring that the original photographers be credited. Flickr later created a new license which identified them as "United States Government Work", which does not carry any copyright restrictions. The photos are posted with this disclaimer: "This official White House photograph is being made available only for publication by news organizations and/or for personal use printing by the subject(s) of the photograph. The photograph may not be manipulated in any way and may not be used in commercial or political materials, advertisements, emails, products, promotions that in any way suggests approval or endorsement of the President, the First Family, or the White House."

Notes and references

1. ↑  An active discussion about privacy laws, access-by-country, The Patriot Act and Code 2257 can be found here
2. Flickr of idea on a gaming project led to photo website, USA Today, 2/27/2006

Links

• Flickr
• FlickrBlog
• Ludicorp corporate website

Third-party tools

• GROU.PS, a free groupware tool for many web service providers, including Flickr too
• Mobup, an open-source application to manage uploads from Java enabled cameraphones.
• FlickrS60, an open-source application to manage uploads from PythonS60.
• Retrievr, an experimental service which lets you search and explore in a selection of Flickr images by drawing a rough sketch or uploading an image.
• Spell with Flickr - spells out words using letters in Flickr photos.
• fd's Flickr Toys - online Flickr tools and games.
• Flickr Montager - Create realtime photo mosaics using images from Flickr.
• Flickr Related Tag Browser
• Slickr - a ticker that pulls images from Flickr and scrolls them along the side of your desktop.
• Flickr Color Picker A Flickr Based Color picker
• Flickr Posters Posters made of images in flickr - Very Impressive and surreal
• The Most Interesting Pictures By... View other users most intersting images.
• Mappr! Where It's At Places flickr photos on a US map

Flickr games

• fastr - ten flickr photos are shown in succession. the faster you guess the common tag, the more points you get
• matchr - a set of flickr photos are shown. find the pairs of photos with common tags in the least amount of time and with the fewest guesses
• Flickrball - a flickr version of the Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon game. starting with one tag and a set of images, find another tag in one of the images that will get you closer to the end tag
• memry - the classic memory game, flickr-style. pick a tag to get 8 photos, then uncover two at a time to find two instances of the same photo
• flickr sudoku - a Sudoku game, but with flickr images. given 9 images, make sure that rows, columns, and 3x3 grids have one of each image

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

Kelkoo.com was founded in 1999 by Pierre Chappaz and Mauricio Lopez. Within 2 years of launching, Kelkoo became Europe's largest e-commerce website after Amazon and Ebay and the largest e-commerce advertising platform both in the UK and Europe by merging with Zoomit, Dondecomprar and Shopgenie.

In April 2004 Kelkoo was acquired by Yahoo! Inc and is now a wholly owned subsidiary.

Kelkoo now operates in 10 European countries and receives over 12 million unique users monthly (over 4 million in the UK) from users across Europe(1). Kelkoo has been profitable since Q4 2002.

Kelkoo is a one-stop shopping service, which helps shoppers to find, research and buy products online. It provides shoppers with tools to compare prices and product features.

Kelkoo was nominated by Nielsen/Netratings one of the 10 most influential websites of the decade(4), and received praise by the BBC Online for "paving the way for online shopping". In October 2004 Nielsen/NetRatings and BBC described Kelkoo as "the dominant shopping guide" in the UK. At the same time, Hitwise announced that Kelkoo was the number 1 UK website, based on visits to the Shopping & Classifieds - Rewards and Directories category.

Kelkoo operates the shopping channels of major Internet players like MSN across Europe (since June 2003), Yahoo! in France, Spain and Italy and provides a product search for Ask Jeeves? in the UK.

The name "Kelkoo" is a funny spelling for the French phrase "Quel coût ?", meaning "What cost ?".

In October 2005 a book on Kelkoo appeared in French called "Ils on reussi leur start-up".

In November 2008, Kelkoo was sold by Yahoo! Inc to the private equity firm Jamplant Ltd.

(1) Nielsen NetRatings (October 2005) data

Links

• Kelkoo.com

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

Yahoo! Search Marketing (formerly Overture Services, Inc.), was an Idealab spin off, originally known as Goto.com, that was the inventor of what is known in the search engine business as P4P, or Pay For Performance. This proved to be a fairly controversial notion, with a lot of concern raised about manipulation and the results being irrelevant. In actuality, the auction model, combined with an extensive editorial team, produced highly relevant search results. Through partnerships, Overture enabled portals such as MSN and Yahoo! to monetize the hundreds of millions of web searches made each day on their sites. Indeed, these partnership proved highly lucrative, and in a period otherwise marked by dot-com failures, Overture became a substantial profit driver for portals like Yahoo!. See [1] (estimating that Overture contributed $25 million to Yahoo!'s revenue in Q3 2002). The business model and its crucial attendant patents were later copied by several competitors, including, most famously, Google under the trademark AdWords.

In 2003, Overture was acquired by one of its biggest customers: Yahoo! for $1.7 billion. See [2]. Before being integrated into Yahoo, it had run AlltheWeb, a web search-engine which it acquired from Fast Search & Transfer in 2003. The old brand names of Overture and others, such as the trademark Site Match are being phased out, as Yahoo re-brands all of its products under the Yahoo name.

Adware controversy

Adware is a type of software, installed on a person's computer (usually as part of a larger software installation), which display ads to the user, based on the user's activity, on, or off the internet. Such software is often controversial because many users find it installed on their system, without consciously placing it there. Many critics call such software "spyware", on the grounds it secretly collects data about the user, and passes it on. Claria (formerly Gator), is a major producer of adware software, which is included in a large number of software applications. Claria displays ads provided from Yahoo (Overture) and other companies. When users click on the ads, Claria collects money from the advertiser, while paying money to Yahoo. Yahoo has been criticized for supporting adware, by giving a financial incentive for its spread.

Further criticism, came when Yahoo came out with the Yahoo! Toolbar, which allows users to remove spyware from their system. However, Yahoo doesn't consider Claria spyware. So, it doesn't remove it, unless the user specifically asks for "adware" to also be removed. Yahoo and Claria contend that the adware software is installed voluntarily, and that the ads provide a useful service. As well, revenue from the ads, allow software to be provided at reduced cost, or even free to users.

A further criticism of Yahoo comes from the fact, that many web sites, supported by advertisements, have found their ads replaced by Claria (sometimes Yahoo) adware ads, which means Claria (and indirectly Yahoo) profit from advertising on a web site, that never consented to show their ads. As well, some webmasters believe this infringes on their private property rights, and right to editorial control. Yahoo asserts that this practise has nothing to do with, since it doesn't own or control Claria.

Bid for placement patent

Prior to its acquisition by Yahoo, Overture asserted it had a patent related to its pay per click business model (U.S. Patent 6,269,361), which includes advertisers bidding for top placement on web sites. In its own words it asserts a patent "...related to the features and innovations surrounding our bid-for-placement products and our pay-for-performance search technologies,..."[3]. It has filed multiple suits over the issue. The largest suit, filed in 2002, was against Google, for its Adwords service, which provides a similar service (on its own web site, and on third party sites). Ultimately, Google and Overture(Yahoo) settled the matter. Google agreed to issue 2.7 million shares of common stock to Yahoo! in exchange for a perpetual license. [4] Overture(Yahoo) had some limited success in settlements and licensing agreements over the patent, but has not yet won a decisive high court victory, that clearly defines and affirms their interpretation of their patent.

Links

• Yahoo! Search Marketing

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

eGroups.com was an email list management web site. The site allowed users to create their own mailing lists, and allow others to sign up for membership on the list. The web site provided archives of the messages as well as list management functionality. Each group also had a shared calendar, file space, group chat, and a simple database.

The company originally started by Scott Hassan in January of 1997 as an email archiving service called FindMail. Carl Page joined part time in May 1997. In December of 1997, Scott decided to add the ability to host free mailing lists and called the new product MakeList.com. Martin Roscheisen joined as CEO in March 1998. Makelist.com quickly grew to 250,000 users before taking funding of $810K from Atlas Venture in May 1998. The post-money valuation was set at $4.5M. In June 1998, the company was renamed to eGroups.com. In October of 1998 with 1.2 million users (growing at 12,000 users per day), the company had an offer on the table from Excite for $40M but decided to take $5.1M more investment money from Sequoia Capital.

In November 1999, Onelist and eGroups merged and started work on going public. The combined company was called eGroups.com with 13 million users exchanging more than 1.3 billion email messages per month. In January 2000, the company raised another $42M and filed a S1 with the SEC in March 23, 2000.

 http://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1105102/0000950149-00-000584.txt

In August 2000 with 18M users, the company was purchased by Yahoo! for $432M in a stock deal and became part of Yahoo! Groups.

 http://docs.yahoo.com/docs/pr/release588.html

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

Yahoo! Buzz is a community-based news article website, much like Digg, that combines the features of social bookmarking and syndication through a user interface that allows editorial control. Users can be allowed to publish their own news stories, and link to their's or another person's site that links to a full story of the information, therefore driving traffic to that person's website and creating a larger market for sites that research and publish their own news articles and stories, such as CNN or smaller, privately owned websites.

Buzz, also like Digg, promotes the news stories that have been the most buzzed by users and displays them to the visitors of the website on the main page.

Buzz was created as a direct competitor to Digg. Yahoo! created the service in hopes that it would drive larger traffic to their site and would give them an advantage over larger online media companies such as Google or MSN, which are Yahoo!'s largest competitors in terms of search engines that provide services and web features to its customers.

Links

• Yahoo! Buzz's official website

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

DomainKeys is an e-mail authentication system designed to verify the DNS domain of an E-mail sender and the message integrity. The DomainKeys specification has adopted aspects of Identified Internet Mail to create an enhanced protocol called DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM). This merged specification is the basis for an IETF Working Group which plans to guide the specification towards becoming an IETF standard.

Both DomainKeys and DKIM were published in May 2007: DomainKeys was issued as a "historical" protocol and DKIM was issued as its standards-track replacement.

Overview

DomainKeys is a method for E-mail authentication. Unlike some other methods it offers almost end-to-end integrity from a signing to a verifying Mail transfer agent (MTA). In most cases the signing MTA acts on behalf of the sender, and the verifying MTA on behalf of the receiver.

DomainKeys is independent of Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) routing aspects, it operates on the RFC 2822 message, the transported mail data, header and body, not the SMTP envelope defined in RFC 2821.

Note that DomainKeys does not prevent abusive behavior; rather, it allows it to be tracked and detected more easily. This ability to prevent some forgery also has benefits for recipients of E-mails as well as senders, and "DomainKey awareness" is programmed into some E-mail software.

Since 2004, Yahoo! has signed all of its outgoing E-mail with DomainKeys and is verifying all incoming mail. As of 2005, Yahoo! reports that the number of DomainKeys-verified e-mail they receive exceeds 300 million messages per day.

Google also uses DomainKeys to sign emails sent from users of its Gmail service; actually going live with it about a month before Yahoo! did. The ISP EarthLink also uses DomainKeys.

How it works

DomainKeys adds a header named "DomainKey-Signature" that contains a digital signature of the contents of the mail message. The default parameters for the authentication mechanism are to use SHA-1 as the cryptographic hash and RSA as the public key encryption scheme, and encode the encrypted hash using Base64.

The receiving SMTP server then uses the name of the domain from which the mail originated, the string _domainkey, and a selector from the header to perform a DNS lookup; the returned data includes that domain's public key. The receiver can then decrypt the hash value in the header field and at the same time recalculate the hash value for the mail body that was received, from the point immediately following the "DomainKey-Signature:" header. If the two values match, this cryptographically proves that the mail did in fact originate at the purported domain, and has not been tampered with in transit.

Development

DomainKeys was designed by Mark Delany of Yahoo!. Many other people including Russ Nelson of qmail, Eric Allman of sendmail, and John R. Levine of the ASRG provided comments and wrote prototype implementations.

DomainKeys is covered by U.S. Patent 6,986,049 assigned to Yahoo!. Yahoo! have released DomainKeys under a dual license scheme. The traditional corporate oriented royalty-free, nonexclusive, relicensable patent license which is designed to be friendly to open source and free software implementations and under GPL 2.0 for the purpose of the DKIM IETF Working Group.

Identified Internet Mail, on which DKIM was also based, was proposed by Jim Fenton and Michael Thomas of Cisco.

Advantages

There are three primary advantages of this system for the domain owner:

• It allows the originating domain of an E-mail to be positively identified, allowing domain-based blacklists and whitelists to be more effective. This is also likely to make phishing attacks more easy to detect.
• It allows forged E-mails to be discarded on sight, either by end-user E-mail software (mail user agents), or by ISPs' mail transfer agents.
• It allows abusive domain owners to be tracked more easily.

There are some incentives for other E-mail users to be able to verify DomainKey information:

• It allows a great reduction in abuse desk work for DomainKeys-enabled domains if E-mail receivers use the DomainKeys system to automatically drop forged E-mails claiming to be from that domain.
• The domain owner can then focus their abuse team energies on their own users who actually are abusing their use of that domain.

Use with spam filtering

With DomainKeys, the absence of a verifiable digital signature header in an E-mail purporting to be from a domain which has a DomainKeys DNS record may indicate that that E-mail is a forgery. Thus, E-mails may be divided into three classes:

• valid DomainKey signature: authentic
• invalid or missing DomainKey signature for a domain with the DNS record: usually forged
• no DNS record or header: unknown status

These values can be used as input to more general spam filtering algorithms.

Compatibility

Because it is implemented using optional RFC 2822 headers and DNS records, DomainKeys is backwards-compatible with the existing E-mail infrastructure. In particular, it is transparent to existing E-mail systems with no DomainKeys support.

DomainKeys has also been designed to be compatible with other proposed extensions to the E-mail system, in particular to be compatible with SPF, the S/MIME E-mail standard and DNSSEC. It is also compatible with the OpenPGP standard.

Disadvantages

DomainKeys or DKIM signatures do not encompass the message envelope, which holds the return-path and message recipients. A concern for any cryptographic solution would be message replay abuse, which bypasses techniques that currently limit the level of abuse from larger domains. For a comparison of different methods addressing also this problem see E-mail authentication.

Content modification in-transit

One of the problems with DomainKeys is that if the message is significantly modified en route by a forwarding mechanism such as a list server, then the signature may no longer be valid and the message may be rejected. If the only modifications en-route involve the addition or modification of headers before the DomainKey-Signature: header, the signature should remain valid; also the mechanism includes features that allow certain limited modifications to be made to headers and the message body without invalidating the signature.

Some suggest that this limitation could be addressed by combining DomainKeys with SPF, because SPF is immune to modifications of the e-mail data, and mailing lists typically use their own SMTP error address aka Return-Path. In short SPF works without problems where DomainKeys might run into difficulties, and vice versa.

Mailing Lists that add or change content also effectively invalidate DomainKeys signatures. Yahoo! suggested that the mailing list should re-sign the message itself under these circumstances, thus in effect taking responsibility for the message.

Protocol overhead

DomainKeys requires cryptographic checksums to be generated for each message sent through a mail server, which results in computational overhead not usually required for e-mail delivery. Until recently, this would have been a serious problem. However, as of 2004 computer processors are now fast enough that the cryptographic overhead represents only around 10% of the overall mail-handling load for a typical system.

Links

• Domain Keys Identified Mail (DKIM)
• IETF DKIM working group (started 2006)
• Yahoo!'s description of DomainKeys
• Yahoo!'s statement about IPR claimed in DKIM draft
• Yahoo!'s free software reference implementation of DomainKeys
• US Patent # 6,986,049
• SpamCop FAQ entry about bogus bounces discusses also DomainKeys

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

Rollyo is a Yahoo!-powered search engine which allows users to register accounts and create search engines that only retrieve results from the websites and blogs they want to include in their search results.

Users can also share their rolled engines with other contributors, also HTML is available to post a mini search box to a user's website.

Rollyo was founded by Dave Pell, built by Argus Durocher, and designed by Dan Cederholm. A private Beta was launched in August 2005 and the final product was released in September of the same year.

It is also possible to add searchrolls to the Mozilla Firefox search bar and to make it Firefox's default search engine.

Links

• Rollyo

Acest articol este licentiat sub GNU Free Documentation License. Foloseste materiale din Wikipedia.

Yahoo! Calendar is a Web-based calendar service from Yahoo! It is one of the biggest online calendar providers on the Internet, serving millions of users (others include Hotmail).

Yahoo! Calendar is currently being re-designed to integrate with Yahoo! Mail Beta (the current version of Mail Beta offers no real integration with Calendar). Apart from some minor releases, the majority of the new version of Calendar is under wraps, and not much of it has been revealed.

On October 8 2008, Yahoo! showcased a preview for the new Yahoo! Calendar. New Features include support for open standards, support for subscriptions to any iCalendar based public calendar, Flickr integration, drag & drop functionality. Features slated for release but that are not yet ready include Outlook auto-sync, integration with other yahoo properties, and options to download other relevant calendars. The new Calendar also comes with a completely redesigned interface.

Features

Yahoo Calendar has the following features:

• 100 year calendar
• various alarm features which allow you to send messages to numerous sources including:
  
  • email
  • mobile devices
  • Yahoo! Messenger
• The ability to sync your calendar with those of Palm devices and Microsoft Outlook.
• Sharing of schedules between users. The mechansim allows several different methods of sharing including publically sharing your calendar, sharing your calendar with a specific Yahoo! Group, and sharing your calendar with a particular Yahoo! user.

Links

• Yahoo! Calendar
• DateDex - Calendar directory, listing global events. Download / Subscribe to calendars in iCalendar format

The Yahoo! Directory is a web directory which rivals the Open Directory Project in size. The directory was initially Yahoo!'s primary offering. When Yahoo! changed to crawler-based listings for its main results in October 2002, the human-edited directory's significance dropped, but it is still being updated. Yahoo! has two submission options: "Standard", which is free, and "Yahoo! Express", which involves a submission fee. Apart from all the controversy that this issue has sparked all across the IT world, this strategy seems to be a major success for both Yahoo! and web site owner's.

Anyone can use Standard submission to submit for free to a non-commercial category. You'll know the category is non-commercial because if you try to submit to a non-commercial category, the Standard submission option will be offered in addition to the Yahoo! "Express" paid option.

Why might you choose to pay, when the free search engine submission option is available? Simply for a fast turnaround time. If you use the free submit choice, there's no guarantee that your submission will be reviewed quickly or at all.

The paid inclusion program called "Express" has a moderate cost. The website submitted will be included quickly (although time figures haven't been mentioned by Yahoo! editors), but, the ranking of the website, on Yahoo! Search web page, won't be influenced. The web master should always monitor their site performance on the ranking. If they're suspicious the paid inclusion isn't drawing more traffic to their site, there's always the option of not renewing the annual subscription and withdrawing from the service.

It's also possible to do a pure search of just the human-compiled Yahoo! Directory, which is how the old or "classic" Yahoo! used to work. To do this, search from the Yahoo! Directory home page ([1]), as opposed to the regular Yahoo.com home page. Then you'll get both directory category links ("Related Directory Categories") and "Directory Results," which are the top web site matches drawn from all categories of the Yahoo! Directory.

There's also great help and tips about Yahoo! Directory here [2]

Links

• Yahoo! Directory
• Yahoo! Crawler Search

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

Yahoo! Games, formally GamesDomain.com is the section of the Yahoo! website in which Yahoo! users can play games either with other users or by themselves. The games on the website are typically Java applets, but there are others which require the program to be downloaded. Yahoo! Games also includes Yahoo! Games Domain–which provides news, previews and reviews of currently available or upcoming First Party games–and Yahoo! Games on Demand–which provides free demos and full-size downloads (for a charge) of regular PC games.

Yahoo! Games has a large user base playing various kinds of games, such as card games, board games, fantasy sports, emulated arcade games, and word games.

Yahoo! Games also features an "All Star" system for users, in which a user can pay to get an All Star username. All Star users are able to get extra privileges on Yahoo! Games sites such as disabling pop-up ads.

Links

• Yahoo! Games

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

Yahoo! Groups is an electronic mailing list service provided by Yahoo!. Over the years, Yahoo! bought several other mailing list providers, including the popular eGroups, and combined them with Yahoo! Clubs into one system. Thus, Yahoo! Groups is now by far the most popular and well-known provider of electronic mailing list facilities.

The category tree of topics in which the groups are sorted is borrowed largely from Yahoo!'s own directory hierarchy, however some subcategories in Yahoo! Directory such as music are so popular in Yahoo! Groups that they have their own top-level category.

As well as providing e-mail relaying and archiving facilities for the many lists it hosts, the Yahoo! Groups service provides additional functions on the web site, such as voting and calendar systems, file uploading, easy management and more. This has helped persuade many large users to continue using the service, since these "value added" elements would be harder to provide on their own servers. However, while the basic mailing list functionality can be used with any e-mail address, the additional features require using a Yahoo! ID for logging on to the web site.

In August 2008 YG staff reported 113 million users, 9 million Groups, and availability in 22 languages.

The web analytics website Quantcast reported around 915 thousand unique visitors to the YG website(US) daily in July 2010. This number has been trending down since 2007, but does not include YG members who access the Groups site via email.

In Sept 2010 at its "Product Runway" event, Yahoo told reporters that Yahoo Groups has 115 million Group members and 10 million Yahoo Groups

Feature list

Each new group created at Yahoo! Groups allows the creator (group owner) to have several features attached to the group. Some of the features can be selected for "off", moderator, members, public. Here is the complete list of possible group features:

• Group members
  • Messages: Post via web or email to group. No edit function except delete.
  • Photo album (100GB): Organized into album/thumbnail structure.
  • File storage (100MB): Capable of storing any file format.
  • Link directory: Options for folders, text labels for each link.
  • Poll: Members can create multiple-choice polls, including various options for ID display.
  • Database: Up to ten tables, each with up to one thousand rows and up to ten columns.
  • Member list: Scroll of registered member profiles, and the basics of the information they provide.
  • Calendar: Scheduling system for clubs with regular events.
  • Promote: HTML box for website display (to join a group).

• Administration (owners or managers who can do post approval)
  • Invite: to invite more members by email.
  • Management of members (approve new members, delete members).
  • Management of messages (approve new messages , delete messages).
  • Options: Edit of the group homepage display text etc.
  • Post approval: It is possible to switch to strict moderation if required.
  • Web tools management: Options are off, public, members, administrators.

In 2006, Yahoo! discontinued the chat feature in Yahoo! Groups.

Links

• Yahoo! Groups (US)
• Yahoo! Groups (UK)

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

David Filo is the somewhat media-shy co-founder of Yahoo! with Jerry Yang.

A native of Moss Bluff, Louisiana, he earned his BS in Computer Engineering from Tulane University and an MS from Stanford University.

Until the company recently decided to switch to PHP, his Filo Server program, written in C, would provide Filo Server Pages that brokered requests from the Yahoo home page.

As a philanthropist, in 2005 he donated $30 million to his alma mater, Tulane University.

Filo is currently married. He and his wife maintain homes in Palo Alto and Redwood City.

Links

• Yahoo! Bio
• Fortune Magazine Bio
• Stanford Jerry Yang and David Filo Bio
• Mark & Marc Interview
• MetroActive: A Couple of Yahoos
• David Filo video interview with Reuters, February 2006

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

On 2001-01-10 Yahoo announced that it would not appeal against the ruling in France. It decided to take the case before a United States District Court in San Jose, California, asking it to find that the French ordinance is not effective in the United States. Judge Jeremy Fogel found the decision returned by the tribunal de grande instance of Paris to be inconsistent with the First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States, relating to freedom of expression, and that consequently it is inapplicable in the United States.

The LICRA and the UEJF appealed the decision before the U.S. Court of Appeals (9th Circuit) for the State of California, who had the responsibility of determining whether France had jurisdiction. The Appeals Court accepted the case and, on August 23, 2004, reversed the earlier finding, arguing that the defendents had acted only with regard to transactions taking place in France as part of Yahoo!'s international business, and that this subjected Yahoo! to French juridiction:

Exercise of jurisdiction is consistent with these requirements of "minimum contacts" and "fair play and substantial justice" where (1) the non-resident defendant has purposefully directed his activities or consummated some transaction with the forum or a resident thereof, or performed some act by which he purposefully availed himself of the privileges of conducting activities in the forum, thereby invoking the benefits and protections of its laws; (2) the claim arises out of or relates to the defendant’s forum-related activities; and (3) the exercise of jurisdiction is reasonable.

There was one dissenting opinion, written by Judge Melvin Brunetti, who argued that "a defendant’s intentional targeting of his actions at the plaintiff in the forum state", which he viewed the French charges and fines as constituting, sufficed to give jurisdiction to the forum state, the United States, under the Supreme Court's "express aiming" precedent.

The case created a media response and sparked a backlash of controversy in the United States, where many saw it as the censoring of a United States publication by a foreign power. Although technically the decision only required Yahoo! to prevent the sale of Nazi objects to people in France, in practice technical limitations make it infeasible to track the geographical location of a customer on the web. The practical consequence was that Yahoo! was forced to monitor and remove any and all such items from its website, at considerable expense to itself, and render appropriate payment of fines to France.

On 2006-01-12, the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit delivered a judgment reversing the judgment of the District Court and remanded the case with directions to dismiss the action. Judge William Fletcher noted that:

Yahoo! is necessarily arguing that it has a First Amendment right to violate French criminal law and to facilitate the violation of French criminal law by others. [...] the extent — indeed the very existence — of such an extraterritorial right under the First Amendment is uncertain.

On 30 May 2006 the Supreme Court of the United States denied certiorari.

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

LICRA complained that Yahoo! were allowing their online auction service to be used for the sale of memorabilia from the Nazi period, contrary to Article R645-1 of the French Criminal Code (Code penal). These facts were not contended during the case.

The defense rested on the fact that these auctions were conducted under the jurisdiction of the United States. It was claimed that there were no technical means to prevent French residents from participating in these auctions, at least without placing the company in financial difficulty and compromising the existence of the internet.

The defendents noted

1. that their servers were located on US territory,
2. that their services were primarily aimed at US residents,
3. that the First Amendment to the United States Constitution guarantees freedom of speech and expression, and that any attempt to enforce a judgement in the United States would fail for unconstitutionality.

As such, they contended that the French court was incompetent to hear the case.

Article R645-1

Article R645-1 of the French Criminal Code prohibits the public display of uniforms, insignias and emblems which "recall those used" by

• an organisation declared illegal in application of Art. 9 of the Nuremberg Statute, or by
• a person found guilty of crimes against humanity as defined by Arts. L211-1 to L212-3 or by the Law n°. 64-1326 of 1964-12-26.

Display is allowed for the purposes of films, theatrical productions and historical exhibitions.

The penalties available are:

• a fine of up to 1500 EUR;
• withdrawal of the right to hold firearms and confiscation of any firearms which are held;
• confiscation of the objects concerned;
• up to 120 hours of community service.

The judgement

An interim judgement of 2000-05-22 confirmed the illegal nature of the sale under French law and appointed experts to advise the court as to what technical measures might be taken to prevent a repeat of the offense. The team of experts reported on 2000-11-06, and the court rendered an injunction against the defendants on 2000-11-10.

Competence of the French court

The court ruled that there were sufficient links with France to give it full jurisdiction to hear the complaint. In particular:

• the auctions of Nazi memorabilia were open to bidders from any country, including France;
• the display of such objects, and the viewing of such objects in France, caused a public nuisance and was forbidden under French criminal law;
• Yahoo! Inc. was aware that French residents used its auction site, as it displayed French-language advertisements on its pages when they were accessed from computers in France.

This last point was also referred to in the injunction against Yahoo! Inc. The court specifically dismissed the claim that the alleged problems of enforcing a judgement were sufficient to nullify its competence.

Societe Yahoo France

Societe Yahoo France had been ordered on 2000-05-22 to warn its users that they may breach French law if they followed links from its site to sites operated by Yahoo! Inc. The court acknowledged that this order had been substantially complied with "in letter and in spirit". It refeused a request from the plaintiffs to order Yahoo France to remove links to the American sites, but reiterated that a warning must be given to users before they activated such links.

Yahoo! Inc.

Yahoo! Inc. had been ordered on 2000-05-22 to take all appropriate measures to deter and prevent access to auctions of Nazi memorabilia on its site by French residents. Yahoo contended that it was impossible to comply with this order.

The report of the court-appointed experts noted that, as of 2000, roughly 70% of French internet users could be identified as such by the use of DNS databases.

The court ruled that Yahoo! Inc. must comply with the original injunction within three months or face a fine of one hundred thousand (100,000) francs (15,244.90 EUR) per day.

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