Yahoo

Do you Yahoo!?

If you connect to the Internet, chances are that you do. Yahoo! is the most popular site on the Internet. More people visit Yahoo! every day than visit America Online or Google or Amazon.com or eBay or any other Internet destination. With more than 237 million users in 25 different countries (and 13 different languages), Yahoo! is visited by more than two-thirds of all Internet users at least once a month. It’s fair to assume that you’re one of those 237 million users, and that you use Yahoo! to find other sites on the Web. But do you know everything you can do at Yahoo!? Do you know all about Yahoo! services, including free e-mail and online shopping and personal ads and stock quotes and TV schedules and travel reservations and interactive games and downloadable music radio and real-time chat and instant messaging and... well, do you?

Yahoo! At a Glance

You know, it’s hard to believe that Yahoo! is ten years old. It was back in January of 1994 that Stanford University PhD students David Filo and Jerry Yang started keeping track of their favorite sites on the Web, collecting and classifying hundreds and then thousands of different Web pages. As their little hobby grew more time-consuming, Filo and Yang created a custom database to house their Web links, and they made the database available for free on the Web. They named the database Yahoo! (an acronym for Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle) and, after about a year, moved their site from the overloaded Stanford servers to the larger-capacity servers of Netscape Communications Corporation. In the spring of 1995, Yang and Filo began to realize the commercial appeal of their increasingly popular site; they accepted some venture capital and turned Yahoo! into a full-time business. Of course, the Yahoo! of today is a far cry from the database that resided on Filo and Yang’s personal workstations at Stanford. Yahoo! has expanded well beyond a simple Web directory (even though most Yahoo! visitors still use the site primarily for searching). Today, Yahoo! is a fullfledged Web portal, a site that not only guides you to content across the Internet, but also contains its own proprietary content and services—everything from stock quotes to online auctions to interactive chat to free e-mail. Just about everything you want to do with Yahoo! can be accessed from the Yahoo! home page (www.yahoo.com). You can use the home page to click through to other Yahoo! sites and services, as well as search or browse through the Yahoo! directory.