Even though it may not be easy to imagine, but the Internet has not been part of our lives for that long. While it is totally common for us to order books, flights or anything else we need really via the WWW, just about ten years ago the Internet was a new phenomenon. It spread faster than bagel-shops in New York City and is now as natural to us as going to the bathroom or falling asleep. With the rise of the Web came the rise of new companies. One of them is Yahoo!

In 1994 the two doctorate electronics students at Stanford University, David Filo and Jerry Yang were looking for a search engine that would make it easy for people to navigate through the then already exploding variety of homepages on the Internet. Their crucial idea was to form categories around certain topics such as sports, news or culture. Yahoo! stands for “Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle” and counted over one million users within its first month of operation.

In 1995 Yahoo! turned into a public corporation and its stocks became available only a year later. What started out as a smart idea by two intelligent students quickly grew into one of the most successful business models of our time. After taking over competing search engines Overture and Inktomi in 2003 and buying into Alibaba in 2005, Yahoo! is clearly set to continue to cruise on its highly successful path along the stormy seas of the Internet marketplace.

Lately such services as a calendar, e-mail accounts, as well as job- and partner-finders have been added to broad spectrum of services offered through Yahoo! A very new partnership is currently under way with Siemens Gigaset. Both companies want to offer the user a way to make Yahoo! calls via a regular telephone. More information coming soon...