When was the searcher born?
David Filo and Dr. Jerry Yang, yahoo!’s founders, were two PhD. students of Electronic Engineering at Stanford University when they decided to gather all the information they were interested in about the Internet, creating the yahoo! guide in 1994.

How did the searcher born?
yahoo! Started as a student’s hobby. David Filo and Jerry Yang spent more hours organizing their links than working in their university’s duties. The Webs list was getting larger so they decide to divide it into categories. And as those categories became insufficient for the amount of information they had to create subcategories… yahoo! was coming to life.
At the beginning it was called “Jerry's Guide to the World Wide Web” , but son it changed its name. yahoo! Stands for "Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle” although Filo and Yang insist on saying the name comes form the general definition of “yahoo”: rough, noisy or bad-mannered, since they considered themselves as “yahoos”. yahoo! started in Yang’s pc "Akebono," while the search mechanism was kept in Filo’s “Konishiki” (both names of legendary Sumo fighters).

How did it evolve? (A brief history of the searcher)
Jerry and David son realized that they were not the only ones interested in having a site where you could find a data base with the most useful and interesting pages. Hundreds of people used the information, even outside Stanford. The news spread and soon they got a significant number of visits for what was at that time the Internet community. By the end of 1994 the got a million visits and almost 100.000 of the unique visitors.

The amount of traffic (Stanford’s net was suffering those consequences) and the enthusiast Welcome yahoo! had made its founders realize the enormous potential their business had. In March 1995 it became a company and they started looking for investors in Silicon Valley. In April 1995 yahoo! was founded with an initial capital of almost 2 millions U$$ granted by Sequoia Capital, a well know company that had invested in Apple Computer, Atari, Oracle and Cisco Systems.

Now aware that their company had an enormous potential to grow fast Filo and Yang started to gather the management crew. Tim Koogle, a Motorota veteran and former student of Stanford’s Engineering Department, was hired, together with Jeffrey Mallett, founder of the consumers’ division in WordPerfect. By the end of 1995 new investors arrived, such as Reuters Ltd. And Softbank. In April 1996, with only 49 employees yahoo! started to be traded in the Stocks Market.

Where are its headquarters?
Central headquarters:
701 First Ave.
Sunnyvale, CA 94089
Telf: (408) 349-3300
Fax: (408) 349-3301

yahoo! in Spain:
yahoo! Iberia S.L.
Calle María de Molina 40, 5º
28006 Madrid
Telf: +34 91 411 87 00
Fax: +34 91 411 88 48

Who are its owners/ stock holders? Where is it traded?
Some of yahoo!’s investors are Sequoia Capital, Reuters Ltd. And Softbank. It is traded in the Nasdaq since April 1996 (as: YHOO). The first stock were sold at U$$13.00 each, closing that same day at U$$33.00 each.

Economy results of the last few years:
yahoo!’s incomes reached the 286 millions in the fourth quarter of 2002. Its benefits before interests, taxes, return of the investment etc. reached the 85 millions in the same period.

What’s its philosophy?
yahoo! aims to become a global and essential Internet service for users and companies.

Organization chart and personnel (departments, number of employees, etc.):
Terry Semel, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer

Jerry Yang, Co-founder & President
David Filo, Co-founder.
Dan Rosensweig, Chairman, Operations.
Susan Decker, Chief Financial Officer, Executive Vice-President.
Jim Brock, Señor Vice-President.
Chris Castro, Senior Vice-President, Chief, Communications.
Gregory Coleman, Executive Vice-President.
Wenda Harris Millard, Chief, Sales.
Farzad Nazem, Executive Vice-President, Chief, Technology.
Libby Sartain, Senior Vice-President, Human Resources.
Jon Sobel, Senior Vice-President.

Management Crew: Ron Burkle, Eric Hippeau, Arthur Kern Tim Koogle Robert Kotick Edward Kozel Gary L. Wilson

What does it offer?
- Users’ Services: information on the internet (news, trips, sports, games, weather); commercial services (shopping, auctions, finances, classified); communication services (e-mail, yahoo! Messenger, yahoo! Groups) and wireless services for PDAs, cell phones and others.

Marketing Services: yahoo! allows agencies and clients to meet an audience, to contact it and the posibility to sell any product trough programs like Fusion Marketing, a group of sales and marketing services that connect the media with yahoo!’s experts: ValueLab.

-Services for companies and business: they connect in an easy and effective way commerce, communications and media in an ideal platform for business, with solutions like: Corporate yahoo!, yahoo! Broadcast Services, yahoo! Small Business.

-Premium Services: yahoo! offers Premium services in different areas of its net for companies (yahoo! Store, Business Express and yahoo! Yellow Pages) as web as for users (yahoo! Auctions, yahoo! Bill Pay and extra storage for the e-mail counts).

How does the searcher work?
Since it uses Google’s data base it operates the same. What are the criteria used for ordering the search results? They are the same as in Google, since yahoo! takes its results from the same data base. Related facts about its data base: yahoo! uses its own directory data base together with Google’s. By buying Inktomi we pretend to gain independence from Google.

How many links does you data base have?
Our directory has more than two millions of web pages in its index. Besides it is updated with Google’s data base.

How many visits do you have a month?
More than 200 millions of users around the world use yahoo!’s net every month (facts up to December 2001).

How does Yahoo make money?
yahoo!’s incomes come from advertising and its program of commercial partners. yahoo!’s advertisement includes many of the very well known brands in the world. IBM Corp., one of the companies that hires most of the Web’s publicity, selected yahoo! to release its new global publicity program trough Internet. Other companies that advertise with yahoo! are American Express, British Airways, Hewlett-Packard, Dell, Apple, Volvo, Volkswagen, Kimberly-Clark, Lancôme, Toshiba and Sony. Kinds of advertisements allowed in the searcher (banners’ campaigns, Click Payment, etc.):horizontal and vertical banners, pop-ups, “Sponsor listings” and click payment. You can see a list with yahoo!’s advertising rates in Spain here:

http://es.docs.yahoo.com/mediakit/tarifas.html