Yahoo! Inc. is an American public corporation incorporated in Sunnyvale, California and a global Internet services company. It provides a range of products and services including a Web portal, a search engine, the Yahoo! Directory, Yahoo! Mail, news, and posting. It was founded by Stanford University graduate students Jerry Yang and David Filo in January of 1994 and incorporated on March 1, 1995. The company is headquartered in Sunnyvale, California in Silicon Valley.

According to Web traffic analysis companies (including Compete.com, comScore,Alexa Internet, and Nielsen Ratings), the domain yahoo.com attracted at least 1,575 million visitors annually by 2008 according to a Compete.com study. The global network of Yahoo! websites receives 3.4 billion page views per day on average as of October 2007, making it one of the most visited U.S. websites.

On February 1, 2008, Microsoft made an unsolicited bid to purchase Yahoo for $31 a share, or $44.6 billion for all the shares. Yahoo's board of directors rejected the offer on February 11, calling it too low. On May 3, 2008, Microsoft withdrew its offer.

n January 1994, Jerry Yang and David Filo were Electrical Engineering graduate students at Stanford University. They started a list of web pages in a campus trailer in February 1994, as a way to keep track of their personal interests on the Internet. The lists were published as a web site named "Jerry's Guide to the World Wide Web", and grew large enough to require categories and subcategories organized in a hierarchy. Before long they were spending more time on their home-brewed lists of favorite links than on their doctoral dissertations.

Early history (1994-1996)

In April 1994, "Jerry's Guide to the World Wide Web" was renamed "Yahoo!". Filo and Yang said they selected the name because they liked the word's general definition, which comes from Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift: "rude, unsophisticated, uncouth." Its URL was akebono.stanford.edu/yahoo.

By the end of 1994, Yahoo had already received one million hits. Yang and Filo realized their website had massive business potential, and on 1 March 1995, Yahoo was incorporated. On April 5, 1995, Sequoia Capital provided Yahoo with two rounds of venture capital. On 12 April 1996, Yahoo had its initial public offering, raising $33.8 million dollars, by selling 2.6 million shares at $13 each.

"Yahoo" had already been trademarked for barbecue sauce (and knives (by EBSCO Industries)). Therefore, in order to get the trademark, Yang and Filo added the exclamation mark to the name.

Growth (1997-1999)

Like many search engines and web directories, Yahoo diversified into a Web portal. In the late 1990s, Yahoo, MSN, Lycos, Excite and other Web portals were growing rapidly. Web portal providers rushed to acquire companies to expand their range of services, in the hope of increasing the time a user stays at the portal.

On 8 March 1997, Yahoo acquired online communications company Four11. Four11's webmail service, Rocketmail, became Yahoo Mail. Yahoo also acquired ClassicGames.com and turned it into Yahoo Games. Yahoo then acquired direct marketing company Yoyodyne Entertainment, Inc. on 12 October. On 8 March 1998, Yahoo launched Yahoo Pager,an instant messaging service that was renamed Yahoo Messenger a year later. On 28 January 1999, Yahoo acquired web hosting provider GeoCities. Another company Yahoo acquired was eGroups, which became Yahoo Groups after the acquisition on 28 June 2000.

When acquiring companies, Yahoo often changed the relevant terms of service. For example, they claimed intellectual property rights for content on their servers, unlike the companies they acquired. As a result, many of the acquisitions were controversial and unpopular with users of the existing services.