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According to Alexa Internet, a web trends company, Yahoo! is the most visited website on the Internet today. The global network of Yahoo! websites received 3 billion page views per day as of October 2004.
The Web site started out as "Jerry's Guide to the World Wide Web" but eventually received a new moniker with the help of a dictionary. The name Yahoo! is an acronym for "Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle," but Filo and Yang insist they selected the name because they liked the general definition of a yahoo, as in Gulliver's TravelsGulliver's Travels ( 1726/ 1735) is a work of fiction pseudonymously authored by the British satirist Jonathan Swift. The first edition was published in 1726 with major changes by the publisher, since he was afraid the book in its original version would o by Jonathan SwiftJonathan Swift ( November 30, 1667 October 19, 1745) was an Anglo-Irish writer and satirist. Jonathan Swift was born, after his father had been dead for seven months, to an English mother, and educated by his Uncle Godwin. After a not very successful care: "rude, unsophisticated, uncouth." Yahoo! itself first resided on Yang's studentAlternate uses: Student (disambiguation Etymologically derived from study a student is one who studies. Also known as a disciple in the sense of a religious area of study, and/or in the sense of a "discipline" of learning. In widest use, student is used t 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, 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: 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, and an online payment system (similar to PayPal) called Yahoo! Paydirect. 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 over content on their servers, which the old companies had not.
Yahoo! has now begun making partnerships with telecommunications and Internet providers - such as BT in the UK, Rogers in Canada and SBC 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! quietly began to bolster its search services by acquiring competing technologies. In December 2002, it acquired Inktomi, and in July 2003, it acquired Overture Services, Inc., and through it, search sites AltaVista and AlltheWeb. On February 18, 2004, Yahoo! dropped Google-powered results, returning to its own results after a long time.