Yahoo! celebrates 10 years, rolls out development initiatives

SPECIAL REPORT

Yahoo! celebrates its 10th birthday today, and to mark the event has not only opened its toolbox to developers, but also promises to expand it advertising network to small publishers.

As the BBC report Yahoo celebrates a decade online reveals, Yahoo! was originally started as a way for students Jerry Yang and David Filo to track their web interests.

The project became a commercial interest with $2 million in venture capital from Sequoia Capital, who had also helped fund expansion of Apple and Cisco. After additional funding, the company floated in April 1996.

Gary Price provides additional details of Yahoo!’s early development in Yahoo: Remembering The Early Days, where he tracks news of the project in early newsnet groups, articles, interviews, and internet archive cache of Yahoo.com from 1996.

When Yahoo! as a company first entered the stock exchange, it already had 50 employees, Now it has over 7,600.

Additionally, as reported in Wired.com’s article The UnGoogle (Yes, Yahoo!), the company also boasts:

165 million registered users,

345 million unique visitors a month,

$49 billion market cap,

Revenue for 2004 revenue was $3.6 billion

On top of that, the company holds a consistant number 1 rank on Alexa, which in it’s Yahoo! website profile page also lists a number of other interesting statistics, such as 41% of Yahoo! traffic being specifically for Yahoo!’s e-mail service.

And as reported in Search engine metrics: analysis, both Nielsen and comScore place Yahoo!’s market share in search at a steady 32%.

As part of the Yahoo! birthday celebrations, Jerry Yang pushed the boat out with a personal appearance at the New York Search Engine Strategies conference, in which Danny Sullivan was able to engage the Yahoo! founder in a question and answer session. Barry Schwartz covers the session in some detail at Keynote with Jerry Yang.

Developer Tools

Yahoo! have today announced the launch of its Yahoo! Developper Network. This API offers the ability to interface scripts with Yahoo! index in a manner similar to Google’s API, but with an allowance up to 5 times that of Google’s. More information on the technical specifics are cover in the Yahoo! Developer Network Documentation.

In Yahoo! Search Web Services Launch! high-profile Yahoo! staff blogger, Jeremy Zawodny posts more information on the announcement, and also provides a comprehensive range of sources covering the news.

The Yahoo! search blog provides additional information on the move. In Announcing the Yahoo! Search Developer Network and Search Web Services, the company states that:

rather than simply release a set of APIs that expose all of our “vertical” searches (web, image, video, news, and local), we thought about what it would take to create an ecosystem around these services.

The developer tools therefore comes presupplied with user community tools, not least a webblog, wiki, and mailing lists on top of existing reference material.

O’Reilly writer Paul Bausch, who wrote Google Hacks, is already the verge of releasing Yahoo! Hacks, with the book scheduled for release in Summer 2005. Announced in Yahoo! Web Services, he not only provides an introductory tour of core features, but also posts a sample application.

While Yahoo! openly state that they expect the release of developer tools to benefit themselves as well as the web community, it;s left to Richard MacManus to really try and prise the lid off the tactics behind the move. In How Yahoo’s Web Services Support Their Media Strategy he highlights as key a sentence in the Yahoo! media release, and comments that not only is Yahoo! moving from a Web 1.0 company into a Web 2.0 company, but that they are trying to drive themselves as the hub of distributed content on the internet:

The more external sites Yahoo can get their content and brand onto, the more recognized and used their brand becomes in media circles - and therefore the more eyeballs they can drive to their Internet entertainment hub.

Overture rebranded - prepares for Yahoo Publishing Network

Yahoo! have also announced a rebranding of its advertiser publishing arm in Overture Services To Become Yahoo! Search Marketing Solutions.

Overture is no more - welcome to Yahoo! Search.

CNet joins this news to the headline of developer tools being released, in Yahoo opens up its search toolbox to developers and point out that Yahoo! are trying to win over the web community, and remind us that Yahoo! originally paid $1.63 billion for Overture.

However, the rebranding seems to be being made for a direct assault on Google’s AdWords/AdSense advertising program, which is the primary engine of profit for Google.

Waxy.org reports in Yahoo’s Contextual Ads in the Wild that what appear to be contextual ads supplied by Yahoo! can currently be seen at The Ink-Stained Wretch - the blog of Yahoo!-Overture product manager Ken Rudman.

For example, in the entry The Jewish Haiku, contextual ads similar to AdSense can be seen - excepting that the code shows it to be supplied by Yahoo! servers:

http://ypn-js.overture.com/partner/js/ypn.js

This could present a real threat to Google’s revenues, and push Yahoo! one-step ahead of their immediate search rivals, and also allow the company a clear head start over Microsoft, which is still signed up to deliver advertising from Yahoo!-Overture until July 2006.

More >> Read personal commentary on this news story in Yahoo! publishing

EDIT: Yahoo! release their version of the past 10 years of the web: Yahoo! Netrospective