In January 1994, Jerry Yang and David Filo were Stanford Electrical Engineering graduate students at Stanford University. They started a list of web pages in a campus trailer in February 1994, as a way to keep track of their personal interests on the Internet. The lists were published as a web site named "Jerry's Guide to the World Wide Web", and grew large enough to require categories and subcategories organized in a hierarchy. Before long they were spending more time on their home-brewed lists of favorite links than on their doctoral dissertations. Like many search engines and web directories, Yahoo diversified into a Web portal. In the late 1990s, Yahoo, MSN, Lycos, Excite and other Web portals were growing rapidly. Web portal providers rushed to acquire companies to expand their range of services, in the hope of increasing the time a user stays at the portal. In 2004, in response to Google's release of Gmail, Yahoo upgraded the storage of all free Yahoo Mail accounts from 4 MB to 1 GB, and all Yahoo Mail Plus accounts to 2 GB. In 2007, Yahoo took out the storage meters and made the storage limit unlimited. On 9 July 2004, Yahoo acquired e-mail provider Oddpost to add an Ajax interface to Yahoo Mail.[23] On 13 October 2005, Yahoo and Microsoft announced that Yahoo Messenger and MSN Messenger would become interoperable. Yahoo! Photos was shut down on 20 September 2007 in favor of Flickr. On 16 October 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.[37] Yahoo partners with hundreds of premier content providers in products such as Yahoo! Sports, Yahoo! Finance, Yahoo! Music, Yahoo! Movies, Yahoo! News, 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. 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. 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.[40] In March 2004, Yahoo launched a paid inclusion program whereby commercial websites are guaranteed listings on the Yahoo search engine after payment.[43] This scheme is lucrative, but has proved unpopular both with website marketers (who are reluctant to pay), and the public (who are unhappy about the paid-for listings being indistinguishable from other search results).[44] As of October 2006, Paid Inclusion doesn't guarantee any commercial listing, it only helps the paid inclusion customers, by crawling their site more often and by providing some statistics on the searches that led to the page and some additional smart links (provided by customers as feeds) below the actual url. Yahoo has also been criticized for funding spyware and adware — advertising from Yahoo's clients often appears on-screen in pop-ups generated from adware that a user may have installed on their computer without realizing it by accepting online offers to download software to fix computer clocks or improve computer security, add browser enhancements, etc. The frequency of advertising pop-ups for spyware, generated from a partnership with advertising distributor Walnut Ventures, who had a direct partnership with Direct Revenue, could be increased or decreased based on Yahoo's immediate revenue needs, according to some former employees in Yahoo's sales department.[45][46] In April 2005, Shi Tao, a journalist working for a Chinese newspaper, was sentenced to 10 years in prison by the Changsha Intermediate People's Court of Hunan Province, China (First trial case no 29), for "providing state secrets to foreign entities". The "secret", as Shi Tao's family claimed, refers to a brief list of censorship orders he sent from a Yahoo Mail account to the Asia Democracy Forum before the anniversary of the Tiananmen Square Incident.[50] The verdict stated Yahoo Holdings (Hong Kong) confirmed that an IP address, registered by a Hunan newspaper that Shi Tao worked for, accessed the mail account at a particular time. He had sent the message through an anonymous Yahoo account, but police had gone straight to his offices and picked him up. Reporters Without Borders (RSF) is concerned with the ease with which Mr. Shi had been caught. In February 2006, Yahoo General Counsel submitted a statement to the U.S. Congress in which Yahoo denies knowing the true nature of the case against Shi Tao.[51] In April 2006, Yahoo Holdings (Hong Kong) is under investigation by Hong Kong's Privacy Commissioner for Personal Data. Yahoo's decision to assist China's authoritarian government came as part of a policy of reconciling its services with the Chinese government's policies. This came after China blocked Yahoo services for a time. As reported in The Washington Post and many media sources: On August 28, 2007, the World Organization for Human Rights sued Yahoo for allegedly passing information (email and IP address) with the Chinese government that caused the arrests of writers and dissidents. The suit was filed in San Francisco for journalists, Shi Tao, and Wang Xiaoning. Yahoo stated that it supported privacy and free expression for it worked with other technology companies to solve human rights concerns.[61] On May 25, 2006, Yahoo's image search was criticized for bringing up sexually explicit images even when SafeSearch was on. This was discovered by a teacher who was intending to use the service with a class to search for "www". Yahoo's response to this was, "Yahoo is aware of this issue and is working to resolve it as quickly as possible".[65]
No comments:
Post a Comment