Yahoo – the growth and the struggle

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Headquartered in Sunnyvale, California, Yahoo incorporation is a multinational Internet Corporation. Yahoo is known for its search engine, web portal and other services that include directory, Yahoo mail, Yahoo News, Yahoo Finance, Yahoo groups, yahoo answers, online mapping, advertising, fantasy sports, video sharing and social media websites.

It was founded in the year 1995 by David Filo and Jerry Yang. According to a survey, around 700 million people visit different websites of Yahoo every month. According to a claim by the Internet Corporation, there are about half million users reaching out for services offered by Yahoo! in different languages.

In the year 2012, Marissa Mayer, former Google executive, has been appointed as CEO and President. The founders were electrical engineering graduate students at Stanford University. The first developmental activity of the website saw it as a directory that organized web content by their hierarchy as opposed to the indexing technology of WebPages. It was first named as “David and Jerry’s guide to the World Wide Web”. It was later on renamed to Yahoo in the year 1995. The name has been derived from “Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle.”

The use of hierarchical described the arrangement of database in various subcategories. The term Racal was used to show wisdom and truth of the company. However, according to David and Jerry, the name was selected for its slang definition, which was used in the early 80s and 90s in the State of Louisiana. There was tremendous growth in the year 1990s. Started as a web search engines and web directory, Yahoo also added a web portal. There was a steep increase in the stock price during the growth of IT sector, which saw the company carry out number of acquisitions. For the period 2000-2004, Yahoo used Google’s service to carry out search.

During this period, Yahoo developed its own search technologies and has implemented the same from the year 2004. Yahoo mail was also revamped in order to meet the competition from Gmail. The company struggled from 2008, which saw several layoffs. Carol Bartz replaced Yang as CEO in the year 2009. Roy Bostock, chairman, Yahoo terminated the services of Carol Bartz and appointed Tim Morse as CEO of the company. In the year 2012, Yahoo also announced a layoff for 2000 employees across the globe. The layoff was expected to save the company $375 million annually. Michael Barrett was appointed as Chief revenue officer in the year 2012.