Products and services
Yahoo! provides a wide array of internet services that cater to most online activities. It operates the web portal
http://www.yahoo.com
which provides content including the latest news, entertainment, and
sports information, and gives users quick access to other Yahoo!
services like Yahoo! Mail, Yahoo! Maps, Yahoo! Finance, Yahoo! Groups and Yahoo! Messenger. The majority of the product offerings are available globally in more than 20 languages.
Storing personal information
As of December 11, 2007, Google and Microsoft's Bing "store personal information for 18 months" and Yahoo! and AOL (Time Warner) "retain search requests for 13 months".
Communication
Yahoo! provides internet communication services such as Yahoo! Messenger and Yahoo! Mail, the largest e-mail service in the world, with almost half the market share. In March 2007, Yahoo! announced that their e-mail service would offer unlimited storage beginning May 2007.
Yahoo! also offers social networking services and user-generated content in products such as My Web, Yahoo! Personals, Yahoo! 360°, Delicious, Flickr and Yahoo! Buzz.
Yahoo! Photos was shut down on September 20, 2007, in favor of
Flickr. On October 16, 2007, Yahoo! announced that they will no longer
provide support or perform bug fixes on Yahoo! 360° as they intend to
abandon it in early 2008 in favor of a "universal profile" that will be
similar to their Mash experimental system.
Content
Yahoo! partners with hundreds of premier content providers in products such as Yahoo! Sports, Yahoo! Finance, Yahoo! Music, Yahoo! Movies, Yahoo! News, Yahoo! Answers and Yahoo! Games
to provide media contents and news. Yahoo! also provides a
personalization service, My Yahoo!, which enables users to collect
their favorite Yahoo! features, content feeds and information into a
single page.
On March 31, 2008, Yahoo! launched Shine, another Yahoo! property
dedicated to women between the ages of 25 and 54. Yahoo! called this
demographic underserved by current Yahoo! properties.
Co-branded Internet services
Yahoo! has developed partnerships with different broadband providers such as AT&T (via BellSouth & SBC), Verizon Communications, Rogers Communications and British Telecom, offering a range of free and premium Yahoo! content and services to subscribers.
Mobile
Yahoo! Mobile includes services for on-the-go messaging, such as email, instant messaging and mobile blogging;
information, such as search and alerts; and fun and games, including
ring tones, mobile games and Yahoo! Photos for camera phones. These
require software to be installed on the user's device.
oneSearch
Yahoo! introduced its Internet search system, called oneSearch,
developed for mobile phones on March 20, 2007. The company's officials
stated that in distinction from ordinary Web searches, Yahoo!'s new
service presents a list of actual information, which may include: news
headlines, images from Yahoo!'s Flickr photos site, business listings,
local weather and links to other sites. Instead of showing only, for
example, popular movies or some critical reviews, oneSearch lists local
theaters that at the moment are playing a certain movie, user ratings
and news headlines regarding the movie. A zip code or city name is
required for Yahoo! oneSearch to start delivering local search results.
The results of a Web search are listed on a single page and are
prioritized into categories. The list of results is based on
calculations that Yahoo! computers make on certain information the user
is seeking.
Yahoo! has announced they also plan to adopt Novarra's mobile content transcoding service for the oneSearch platform.
Commerce
Yahoo! offers commerce services such as Yahoo! Shopping, Yahoo! Autos, Yahoo! Real Estate and Yahoo! Travel,
which enables users to gather relevant information and make commercial
transactions and purchases online. In addition, Yahoo! offers an
e-commerce platform called Yahoo! Merchant Solutions (also known as
Yahoo! Store) and hosts more Top 500 internet retailers than any other
hosted e-commerce solution. Yahoo! Auctions were discontinued in 2007
except for Asia.
Small business
Yahoo! provides services such as Yahoo! Domains, Yahoo! Web Hosting,
Yahoo! Merchant Solutions, Yahoo! Business Email and Yahoo! Store to
small business owners and professionals allowing them to build their
own online stores using Yahoo!'s tools.
Yahoo! also offers HotJobs to help recruiters find the talent they seek.
Advertising
Yahoo! Search Marketing
provides services such as Sponsored Search, Local Advertising, and
Product/Travel/Directory Submit that let different businesses advertise
their products and services on the Yahoo! network. Yahoo! Publisher Network is an advertising tool for online publishers to place advertisements relevant to their content to monetize their websites.
Yahoo! launched its new Internet advertisement sales system on February 5, 2007, called Panama. It allows advertisers
to bid for search terms based on their popularity to display their ads
on search results pages. The system takes bids, ad quality, click-through rates
and other factors into consideration in determining how ads are ranked
on search results pages. Through Panama, Yahoo! aims to provide more
relevant search results to users, a better overall experience, as well
as increase monetization—to earn more from the ads it shows.
On April 7, 2008, Yahoo! announced APT from Yahoo!, which was originally called AMP! from Yahoo!, an online advertising management platform.
The platform seeks to simplify advertising sales by unifying buyer and
seller markets. The service was launched in September 2008.
Yahoo! Next
Yahoo! Next is an incubation ground for future Yahoo! technologies currently in their beta testing phase. It contains forums
for Yahoo! users to give feedback to assist in the development of these
future Yahoo! technologies. It was created by Jerry Page and David Shin.
Yahoo! BOSS
Yahoo! Search BOSS is a new service that allows developers to build search applications based on Yahoo!'s search technology. Early Partners in the program include Hakia, Me.dium, Delver, Daylife and Yebol.
Yahoo! Meme
Yahoo! Meme is a beta social service, similar to the popular social networking sites Twitter and Jaiku.
