Usually, when we hear Yahoo, people think of it as just an Email service provider (Yahoo Mail), but Yahoo is more than that. Launched in late 1994, Yahoo is a web services provider that provides many services ranging from search engine to social media.
Yahoo owns a social media platform like Tumblr, music player extensions like Foxytunes, and many more. An estimated 700 million people use yahoo’s services, and yahoo.com ranks fifth on the most visited web pages on the Internet.
Thought Yahoo has a lot of services, the most popular service is Yahoo Mail.
Yahoo and Its services
What is Yahoo Mail?
Yahoo mail is an internet service that utilizes the platform for the exchange of information via mails, popularly termed as email. It is a webmail site that is used by users from all over the world. Launched before years on October 8, 1998, Since then, Yahoo has been providing regular service every single day. Its services are completely free of cost, so it has a total of 250 million users. And it’s estimated net worth is around 4.5 billion dollars ($4,500,000,000). Yahoo mail is an email service created by the American parent company Yahoo!
Advantages of yahoo mail over other webmail’s:
- It has a much cleaner interface than any other webmail.
- It is much easier to use and is in no way complex.
- Yahoo allows you to register all of your email address and your social media accounts, so you can use it from Yahoo’s interface.
- It provides you with all the amount of storage that you need for free of cost.
Disadvantages of yahoo mail over other webmail’s:
- It is outdated in many ways.
- You will be interrupted or distracted by advertisements as a lot of ads are present.
- Your mails are not in an organized way, so you will have to sort it out on your own.
So these are some of the advantages and disadvantages of Yahoo mail service over other webmail services.
Other Primary Services By Yahoo apart from Yahoo Mail.
Some of the primary other services provided by Yahoo! are:
- Web portal.
- Search engine.
- News.
- Mail.
- Finance.
- Messenger.
- Yahoo! Answers.
- Podcast.
- Yahoo! Player.
There are lots of other Services provided by yahoo. You can find all the listing at their official website at Yahoo Everything.
Yahoo Answers:
Yahoo! Answers is an online community where people ask the question or can answer other people’s question. It’s an online knowledge exchange community. Yahoo Answers have answers to almost all questions. You can ask any question you want provided that the subject matter does not violate the site’s community guidelines. Since it’s launch from 2005, the site has been trendy among people for both knowledge propose as well as trolling due to some humorous questions and answers.
Yahoo Homepage :
Yahoo has provided the browser extension application called Yahoo Home Page. After installing the extension, you can get daily top headlines when you open your browser. The extension also provides features like easy access to your yahoo mail, make Yahoo your default search engine, and more.
Yahoo Entertainment:
From movies to football games, Yahoo Entertainment provides everything in one place. It provides movie showtimes, videos, and news specific to TV, movies, celebrities, music, sports news, scores, rumors, fantasy games, and more.
Yahoo Finance:
If you are an Investor or Share market enthusiast, Yahoo Finance is the best portal for you. Get Stock market information, quotes, finance news, and more under the single roof.
Yahoo Groups:
Started in early 2001, Yahoo Groups is one of the world’s largest online discussion boards. It’s one of the many services of Yahoo, which enables users to create a group to form an email list so that the user can share messages using one email address. User can read/post the Group message\ in two ways; through the email used on the Group or directly through the Group’s website like a forum, blog, etc. Groups can set up with public or member-only access.
My Yahoo:
My Yahoo! is a web page which you can customize yourself as per your needs and interest. Launched in 1996, My Yahoo is one of the company’s most popular creations. My Yahoo page is fully customizable where users can change the appearance, layout, and content, apply themes, add sites, add widgets, rearrange the layout, and add tabs to the page.
On MyYahoo page, you can aggregate everything you needed on single pages like social networking addons, lottery numbers, email, news, etc. The aim is to give people access to everything they’re interested in on a single page.
Yahoo News:
With Yahoo News, You can get the latest news from around the world and in the United States.
Yahoo Search:
Yahoo Search engine is the third most used search engine in the world. On yahoo search, you just enter the keyword of what you are looking for, and the search engine will provide websites, videos, images, blogs, and more related to those keywords.
Yahoo Shopping:
Yahoo Shopping is not as big as other brands like Amazon, Ebay. Shop through Yahoo by browsing stores, brands, or categories like electronics, toys, sporting goods, flowers, gifts, clothing, and more.
Yahoo Weather:
With yahoo weather, you can view the current weather and forecast where you are and around the world. Yahoo has got IOS, and Android application for this service through which mobile users can easily view weather infromation via mobile. Desktop, Laptop or Mobile browser can also be used to access Yahoo Weather.
Yahoo Small Business
Yahoo Small Business (formerly known as Aabaco Small Business) is a service offered by the Yahoo! Mail corporation to get users to start up and expand their business online. Yahoo Small Business focuses on the services like Web hosting, Website building, Domain mail system with the user domain name.
Yahoo People Search
This service of Yahoo was a search utility for people to find phone numbers, addresses, and email information. The search engine was accessible at people.yahoo.com.
Intelius(an information retrieval organization) also provides some information for it. Most of the information found using the tool was free, but if you decided to pursue the information that Intelius offered, you’d have to pay.
Note: This service has been discontinued.
Companies acquired by yahoo.
Not being limited to providing a single makes Yahoo one of the highest-grossing online service providers. Yahoo also had successfully acquired various companies, and some of the major companies are:
Tumblr:
It is an American social networking site where you can express yourself by sharing images, videos, stories, etc. and is also used by Micro bloggers as a microblogging website. Created in 2007, Yahoo acquired it later on May 20, 2013, for an estimated value of 1.1 billion dollars. ($1,100,000,000)
Flicker:
It is a photo-sharing and video-sharing application acquired by Yahoo on March 20, 2005, for an estimated price of 22 million dollars ($22,000,000), and after about ten long years, it removed its association with Yahoo.
Del.icio.us:
Yahoo acquired Del.icio.us on December 9, 2005, to store bookmarks of websites online. Then it was later sold to founders of YouTube.
Bix:
Yahoo acquired it on November 16, 2006, was used to provide people with self-service tools; it generated its revenue by holding a contest among the various users of the site. And then bix was later shut down by Yahoo on June 30, 2009.
Wretch:
Wretch, in Chinese, means “Nameless little site” was a social networking site predominantly used in the country of Taiwan. Yahoo later released it on December 26, 2013.
Adinterax:
Yahoo acquired it on October 17, 2006, and it was an online advertising company. It would show various advertisements to a particularly targeted audience, thus gained a lot of popularity in the mid-2000s. It was recently shut down by Yahoo on March 8, 2018.
Astrid:
It was acquired by Yahoo on May 1, 2013, to use it as a task management application for android mobile. Its partnership did not work out for long as Yahoo released it on August 5, 2013.
Blo.gs:
It was created in 2002 and had been regularly providing service to people across the world till date. Yahoo later acquired it in June of 2005; and used it for the storage of some of the most recently updated blog posts. Then it was later released after five years in 2009.
Fire eagle:
It was created by yahoo on March 5, 2008. It was mainly known as a Yahoo-owned company that would save the user’s location and would provide it to trusted sites, thus decreasing the total workload of the users.
Kelkoo:
Yahoo acquired it in 2004, as tied cooperation with yahoo for 4years and after that, used as a search engine for shopping websites. It helps you choose and compare various offers between different sites to do your online shopping that much easier.
Foxytunes:
It was a service available in Firefox and Internet Explorer that allowed you to add a browser extension into your browser that allowed you to control media players from your browser.
Rocketmail:
Rocketmail was an email service similar to Yahoo mail and was one of the opposing threats, so Yahoo decided to buy it and then shut it off completely.
Upcoming:
Yahoo acquired it on October 5, 2005, which was a social event calendar. That notified you and reminded you of important dates that you would save.
But not all companies that are associated with Yahoo have made it till the current date many companies were acquired and then later released in the previous years.
These were some of the most noticeable acquirement by Yahoo to its already large and diversified system.
Yahoo future plans
Yahoo was once the top web service provider company in the world, but it’s not the case now. Many other companies have taken its crown. Google is now the leading email service on the Internet. Netflix is leading on video-streaming service. Google.com is the most used search engine in the world; In fact, it’s so popular that the word “google” itself is considered synonymous with search.
With a lot of competitors like Google, Microsoft overtaking the market, yahoo has to plan something big and promising if they want to be the top web service provider company again.
After reading the article, you should have got the idea that yahoo has many web services. They have Yahoo Mail, Yahoo Search, Yahoo Answer, Yahoo Sports, and many more. When you look at Yahoo’s overall service, we see that yahoo is like Jack of all trades, master of none.
Yahoo company has decided to narrow down it’s a product and be more focused in the future. They will analyze their products will focus more on those products that have a good future and are profitable for the company. For other products, they will “disinvest” the product.