Hey there, Back to our most popular series. Today we take a look at the company that was started by two young Stanford Students as a “fun” project which has grown to a $100 Billion dollar Company with over 14,000 employees. Let’s take a look at some of the interesting Yahoo facts.
1. Jerry’s Guide to the World Wide Web
Surprisingly enough, Yahoo! was initially called “Jerry’s guide to the world wide web” which includes the name of one of the co-founders of Yahoo! named Jerry Yang (The other being David Filo).Yahoo was created as a simple catalog which contained the site links on the Internet. This catalog gained popularity and expanded very quickly, so Jerry and David had to break it into the categories – for that time it was a revolution – hierarchical index Web was broken into the topics: “Computers”
2. Why Yahoo! and not just Yahoo?
You might have wondered at one point of time that why is it “Yahoo!” and not just “Yahoo”.Well, At that time “Yahoo” was already trademarked by a company that produced barbecue sauce, knives and human propelled watercraft. For this reason Yang and Filo added the exclamation point to the end of Yahoo! This gave them a unique identification to separate themselves from “Yahoo”. Yahoo is an acronym for “Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle.”
3. .COM Bubble Burst
The .COM bubble burst was perhaps the biggest crisis websites have ever faced. What this really was that, In a “bubble”, Companies become highly overvalued and investors throw money without even looking at the business plan, When this bubble “bursts”, All the companies go down the drain.The .COM bubble finally burst after March 10, 2000. Many big players went bankrupt. NASDAQ climbed down 10% in just 5 days. The “Siliconaires” started to move back to their parents garages. Many big companies were affected, And so was Yahoo!. Yahoo!’s stocks highest closing was at $118.75 a share on 3 January 2000. The Dot Com Bubble brought Yahoo stock to all-time low of $8.11. This was a period of depression for Yahoo! as it was going bankrupt in some days. But some financial help from investors kept the company afloat and it moved towards being stable. Yahoo! was among the very very few companies that survived that.
4. Yahoo! is a lot more than what you expected.
Are you one of those people that think that People don’t use Yahoo! anymore except for it’s mail? Oh Boy, you are mistaken as Yahoo! has a LOT of users for it’s services, In some cases the MOST. Yahoo! offers more than 50 services (Excluding the ones that have been closed).Yahoo! has acquired 58 companies , 47 of these acquired companies are from the United States, and 8 are based in a foreign country . Want to know some facts? Here you go:- The average Yahoo! Messenger chit-chat is 17 times longer than one on a cell phone. It would take 7,000 years for all the photos on Flickr to be developed. Yahoo! Groups has more members than the number of International Red Cross volunteers. And, it would take 50,000 planes to fly all of the Yahoo! Travel users on a group vacation! Today, Yahoo takes the second place as for the popularity in the world among the search systems, and the first place as for the number of users registered on the Yahoo portal, which provides with a list of services, such as Yahoo Mail, Yahoo Games, Yahoo Music and so on..
5. Yahoo has the most number of Services a company has ever shut down!
Well, Yahoo! makes mistakes too! It holds the record for closing down the maximum number of services by ANY company! Here is a list of the services it has shut down:-
- Bix /
- 2blo.gs
- Kelkoo
- Jumpcut.com
- Yahoo! 360°
- Yahoo! Auctions
- Yahoo! Gallery
- Yahoo! Geocities
- Yahoo! GeoCities
- Yahoo! Greetings
- Yahoo! HotJobs
- Yahoo! Kickstart
- Yahoo! Mash
- Yahoo! Photos
- Yahoo! Briefcase
- Yahoo! Live
- Yahoo! Podcasts
- Yahoo! Tech
- Rocketmail
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