Yahoo! turns 10 years old

1 March 2005 23:44 GMT / By Kenneth Henry

Update: For a retro look at Yahoo's first homepage, visit here.

They're as old as the Pentium, but like every other website which becomes essential, Yahoo! came from humble beginnings and became the Google of its day, starting with just a search function.

The site floated on the American stock exchange in Spring 1996 and went from two to 50 employees, to over 7,500 now. As Yahoo! Grew, it was the addition of email which almost surpassed the category searching as a must-have utility which kept people logging on and coming back, and then, as Outlook-based viruses took hold, led users to pay annual fees for larger mail storage, which led to increased profits.

MSN and AOL are its oldest rivals, but now all are under threat from Google - in spite of various added services and established ISP markets. This may have been the catalyst which led Yahoo to rebrand BT's internet service in the UK two years ago. The Google threat led Yahoo! and Microsoft to give away much more space online, and give you 2Gb for a fee, to let you store many more digital files and just not keep people to restrictive email limits, so the competition has been good for consumers.

With a Q3 profit of £187million without including investment selloffs, thanks to advertising, and plans to try and acquire a stake in Indiatimes, India's biggest media company, Yahoo! long story continues and here's to another 10 years.

Full tags

Software, Online, Search engines, Yahoo