Yahoo

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Yahoo’s longtime Sunnyvale campus in 2017, shortly after the Internet giant was sold to Verizon.

© Andreistanescu/Dreamstime.com

Yahoo Inc. is an American Internet company known for its news, finance, sports, and email websites. The company maintains major offices in Sunnyvale, California, and New York City and has been privately held since 2021, when Verizon Communications (VZ) sold its media business to Apollo Global Management. Yahoo was founded in 1994 by Jerry Yang and David Filo, graduate students at Stanford University, and was one of the early, widely used gateways to the World Wide Web. It provides users with online information and communication services.

Yahoo, which in its early years offered a directory of websites along with a search engine, email, and news, began as a simple list of Yang and Filo’s favorite Internet links. The project was first known as Jerry and David’s Guide to the World Wide Web, but as it grew in popularity it was renamed Yahoo, an acronym for “Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle.” Incorporated as Yahoo! Inc. in 1995, the company went public the following year on the Nasdaq stock exchange under the ticker symbol YHOO, becoming one of the most prominent firms of the emerging dot-com economy. In 1996, Yahoo launched Yahoo! Japan as a joint venture with SoftBank, eventually becoming a major shareholder in the Japanese portal.

During the ensuing dot-com frenzy, Yahoo expanded rapidly through acquisitions, including Rocketmail and ClassicGames.com, which became Yahoo! Mail and Yahoo! Games. When the dot-com bubble collapsed in 2001–02, the company survived even as many Internet companies failed, though Yahoo sustained significant financial losses.

Yahoo competed with Google (GOOGL) throughout the early 2000s in an effort to retain and expand its share of the Internet search market. During this period, the company introduced services such as Yahoo Messenger, acquired the photo-sharing site Flickr, and bought a 40% stake in the Chinese e-commerce company Alibaba. These moves diversified the business but didn’t significantly alter the balance of competition in online search. In February 2008, Microsoft Corporation (MSFT) offered to buy Yahoo for $44.6 billion, an offer Yahoo rejected. Microsoft withdrew the proposal soon afterward. Negotiations between the companies continued, and they eventually agreed to collaborate on search and advertising initiatives, with Yahoo adopting Microsoft’s Bing search technology on its sites under a partnership that evolved over time.

Amid growing financial difficulties, Yahoo hired Marissa Mayer as its chief executive officer in 2012. Mayer, who had been a prominent executive at Google, attempted to revitalize Yahoo through product redesigns, acquisitions, and a renewed focus on mobile services, but these efforts produced limited improvement in the company’s competitive position.

In 2016, Verizon Communications agreed to acquire Yahoo’s core operating businesses, including its Internet, media, and advertising operations, for about $4.8 billion. The closing was delayed after Yahoo disclosed a series of large-scale security breaches affecting more than one billion user accounts. It was later determined that all Yahoo accounts, roughly three billion, had been compromised. The sale was completed in 2017 for $4.48 billion. Yahoo’s operating assets were combined with those of AOL in a new Verizon subsidiary called Oath, though the Yahoo name continued to be used for the company’s major consumer services.

The portion of Yahoo not included in the sale—most notably its large equity stakes in Alibaba and Yahoo Japan—became a separate investment entity called Altaba. Altaba subsequently sold its Yahoo Japan holdings in 2018, and in 2019 its shareholders approved a plan to liquidate the company’s remaining Alibaba shares and wind down the fund.

In 2019, Verizon retired the Oath name and began operating the business as Verizon Media. The Yahoo brand continued to be used for the company’s major consumer services.

In 2021, Verizon agreed to sell Verizon Media to Apollo Global Management, a private equity firm, while retaining a minority stake in the business. The sale closed in September 2021, after which the business was renamed Yahoo Inc., without the exclamation point used in the former public company’s legal name. Jim Lanzone, formerly head of Tinder and a longtime digital media executive, was named CEO later that year.

Under Apollo’s ownership Yahoo concentrated on its highest-traffic properties, particularly Yahoo Finance, Yahoo Sports, Yahoo News, and Yahoo Mail, and reduced or sold businesses viewed as peripheral. The company continued to reorganize in the mid-2020s, including divesting several media assets and exploring the sale of AOL, which Yahoo still owned as of late 2025.

Meanwhile, Yahoo also made incremental changes to the features and data available through its major sites. In December 2025, the company said it would roll out new sections devoted to cryptocurrency and prediction markets—using data from Polymarket—in early 2026 on the Yahoo Finance website, along with expanded market data.