A Decade of Yahoo!

Top search engines have a few striking similarities. Yahoo! and Google have double "o" trademarks (something Google playfully resemble to a wobbling eyeball) and are both founded by doctorate students of Stanford. But since Yahoo! came into the scene first and is now celebrating its first decade in the business, this piece of blog is devoted to them.

It's been ten years since Yahoo! roamed the Cyberspace with its trademark capital Y that has evolved from a search engine whose name stands for Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle but later claimed that the name was chosen because "it is rude and unsophisticated" and thereby a new paradigm in online communications.

Founded by American David Filo and Taiwanese Jerry Yang, Yahoo! was an effort to address those "online yellow pages" concerns. The business emerged first as a solution to a problem by the then cyberspace navigators who could not find a one-stop resource for various directories of links on the web. The response from the local community was overwhelming and the founders realized they have a business potential in their hands.

After talking to capitalists, they were able to secure investment from Sequoia Capital whose other ventures included Apple Computer and Oracle. As a startup business they hired a fellow Stanford alumnus and ex-Motorola guy Tim Koogle. A second phase of funding enabled them to kickstart the business and launched the much-hyped IPO in late 1995 while having 49 employees. While continuously addressing the first requests of peers on "online yellow pages", Yahoo! thought it should not be limited in providing search results and classified directories. With money in their hands and wanting to attract more people to know the brand and eventually become their future customers, Yahoo! purchased Geocities in a way to attract web users to set up their own free homepage on the Net.

(I remember the old-fashioned Geocities neighborhood wherein you are going to choose an address from an array of blocks and areas such as Athens and Area51; mine was Yosemite/4986).

Yahoo! also acquired Rocketmail.com as a free e-mail service in its effort to position itself against competitor Hotmail which was bought by Microsoft at the time. Other services bought by Yahoo across the years were Hotjobs.com, Overture (formerly Goto), Webring and Broadcast.com. As a result, Yahoo! became poised to call itself a portal, meaning that online visitors can use various services offered by Yahoo! through its acquisitions: read news, build websites, post message at e-groups, search the web, stocks and weather, among others. Among these, Yahoo! e-mail and Instant Messenger were the runaway leaders used by a typical web surfer.

By providing such services to online viewers, Yahoo! also reached out to companies who want to attract attention by posting banner ads on certain web pages for a fee.

Intially, Yahoo! offers free listing of webpages on designated directories but as the submissions became huge, Yahoo! offered an alternative for express listing without having to wait for several weeks for a listing to appear. Yahoo! charges an annual fee of $299 for a website to be listed in its directories. Soon the constant battle to win attention evolved from banner ads to search result related links. With its acquisition of Overture, Yahoo! is in a position to offer paid listings where sponsors can see their links appear on top of every search engine results on certain keywords related to their products.

After the dotcom bust, emergence of Google and other challenges in the online world such as hacking, fraud and spam issues, Yahoo! is happy to celebrate its 10 years of stay on the web.