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Yahoo!

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Internet Website

The Resume

    (January 1994- )
    Web services provider and search engine
    Founded by Jerry Yang and David Filo
    Headquartered in Sunnyvale, California
    Includes Yahoo Mail and Yahoo News
    Originally called 'David and Jerry's Guide to the Word Wide Web'
    Tagline was 'Do You Yahoo?'

Why Yahoo! might be annoying:

    It was easily overtaken by Google and Facebook.
    Its tag line sounded like a phone sex hotline's.
    Its commercials had a yodeler wail its name at the end of each spot.
    It and its affiliated sites (Yahoo Mail, Yahoo News) were - and still are - jam packed with ads, spam, and 3rd party content.
    They squandered their resources on bad investments (Broadcast.com in 1999, GeoCities in 2002, Tumblr in 2013).
    They had the opportunity to purchase Google for $3 Billion in 2002 and Facebook for $1 Billion in 2005 - and passed on both.
    Microsoft offered to buy it for $44.6 Billion and were turned down (2008).
    The founders justified the decision to investors by claiming the offer was too low, even though it was 60% higher than Yahoo!’s market value at the time.
    Eventually, Verizon would buy its web services for $4.48 billion - barely ten percent of Microsoft's original offer (2017).
    The closing of the Verizon deal was delayed by the public announcement that it had been subjected to a series of security breaches, compromising more than three billion user accounts.
    It shut down its Yahoo Answers site permanently after the number of poorly formed questions, inaccurate answers, voting abuse, and wider availability of search engine filters made it both obsolete and a target of ridicule (May 4, 2021).

Why Yahoo! might not be annoying:

    It was one of the first big names truly ubiquitous to the Internet.
    Its ads first aired during commercial breaks on Late Night with David Letterman and Saturday Night Live (one of the first such instances for a website to so enter the mainstream).
    Its name is apparently an acronym - standing for 'Yet Another Hierarchically Officious Oracle' (which sounds totally on the level).
    Its initial public offering in 1996 was the largest for a tech startup at the time.
    It was the first online service to stream a regular season NFL American football match, garnering over 15 million viewers.
    Although it has dropped a few levels in importance, it is still in wide use (can't exactly say the same for Ask Jeeves or MySpace).
    Yahoo! Finance is one of its few subsidiaries to both remain popular and widely outperform its competitors.
    At least one of its investments did pay off some dividends - that being Jack Ma's e-commerce site Alibaba (later reformed as Altbaba).
    It was cheekily spoofed in Bruce Almighty when Bruce/God creates a computerized system to receive prayers and automatically 'Yes' them all (The name? What else - 'Yah-weee-eh!').

Credit: BoyWiththeGreenHair


Featured in the following Annoying Collections:

Year In Review:

    In 2023, Out of 14 Votes: 50.0% Annoying
    In 2022, Out of 13 Votes: 53.85% Annoying