A website (or web site) is a collection of related webpages (or web pages), images, videos or other digital assets that are addressed with a common domain name or IP address in an Internet Protocol-based network. A web site is hosted on at least one web server, accessible via the Internet or a private local area network.

A webpage is a document, typically written in plain text interspersed with formatting instructions of Hypertext Markup Language (HTML, XHTML). A webpage may incorporate elements from other websites with suitable markup anchors.

Webpages are accessed and transported with the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP), which may optionally employ encryption (HTTP Secure, HTTPS) to provide security and privacy for the user of the webpage content. The user’s application, often a web browser, renders the page content according to its HTML markup instructions onto a display terminal.

All publicly accessible websites collectively constitute the World Wide Web.

The pages of a website can usually be accessed from a simple Uniform Resource Locator (URL) called the homepage. The URLs of the pages organize them into a hierarchy, although hyperlinking between them conveys the reader’s perceived site structure and guides the reader’s navigation of the site.

Some websites require a subscription to access some or all of their content. Examples of subscription sites include many business sites, parts of many news sites, academic journal sites, gaming sites, message boards, web-based e-mail, services, social networking websites, and sites providing real-time stock market data.

History

The World Wide Web was created in 1991 by CERN engineer Tim Berners-Lee.^[1] On 30 April 1993, CERN announced that the World Wide Web would be free to use for anyone.^[2]

Before the introduction of HTML and HTTP other protocols such as file transfer protocol and the gopher protocol were used to retrieve individual files from a server. These protocols offer a simple directory structure which the user navigates and chooses files to download. Documents were most often presented as plain text files without formatting or were encoded in word processor formats.

Overview

Organized by function, a website may be

• a personal website
• a commercial website
• a government website
• a non-profit organization website

It could be the work of an individual, a business or other organization, and is typically dedicated to some particular topic or purpose. Any website can contain a hyperlink to any other website, so the distinction between individual sites, as perceived by the user, may sometimes be blurred.

Websites are written in, or dynamically converted to, HTML (Hyper Text Markup Language) and are accessed using a software interface classified as a user agent. Web pages can be viewed or otherwise accessed from a range of computer-based and Internet-enabled devices of various sizes, including desktop computers, laptops, PDAs and cell phones.

A website is hosted on a computer system known as a web server, also called an HTTP server, and these terms can also refer to the software that runs on these systems and that retrieves and delivers the web pages in response to requests from the website users. Apache is the most commonly used web server software (according to Netcraft statistics) and Microsoft‘s Internet Information Server (IIS) is also commonly used.

Website styles

Static website

Main article: static web page

A static website is one that has web pages stored on the server in the format that is sent to a client web browser. It is primarily coded in Hypertext Markup Language (HTML).

Simple forms or marketing examples of websites, such as classic website, a five-page website or a brochure website are often static websites, because they present pre-defined, static information to the user. This may include information about a company and its products and services via text, photos, Flash animation, audio/video and interactive menus and navigation.

This type of website usually displays the same information to all visitors. Similar to handing out a printed brochure to customers or clients, a static website will generally provide consistent, standard information for an extended period of time. Although the website owner may make updates periodically, it is a manual process to edit the text, photos and other content and may require basic website design skills and software.

In summary, visitors are not able to control what information they receive via a static website, and must instead settle for whatever content the website owner has decided to offer at that time.

Text editors, such as Notepad or TextEdit, where content and HTML markup are manipulated directly within the editor program

• WYSIWYG offline editors, such as Microsoft FrontPage and Adobe Dreamweaver (previously Macromedia Dreamweaver), with which the site is edited using a GUI interface and the final HTML markup is generated automatically by the editor software
• WYSIWYG online editors, where any media rich online presentation like websites, widgets, intro, blogs etc. are created on a flash based platform
• Template-based editors, such as Rapidweaver and iWeb, which allow users to quickly create and upload websites to a web server without having to know anything about HTML, as they just pick a suitable template from a palette and add pictures and text to it in a DTP-like fashion without ever having to see any HTML code

Dynamic website

Main article: dynamic web page

A dynamic website is one that changes or customizes content automatically and/or frequently based on certain criteria. The page composition is usually data-driven and collates information ad hoc each time a page is requested.

A website can be dynamic in one of two ways. The first is that the web page code is constructed dynamically. The second is that the web page content displayed varies based on certain criteria. The criteria may be pre-defined rules or may be based on variable user input.

The main purpose of a dynamic website is that it is much simpler to maintain a few template pages and a database than it is to build and update hundreds or thousands of individual web pages and links.

A dynamic website also describes its construction or how it is built, and more specifically refers to the code used to create a single web page. A dynamic web page is generated on the fly by piecing together certain blocks of code, procedures or routines. A dynamically-generated web page would call various bits of information from a database and put them together in a pre-defined format to present the reader with a coherent page. It interacts with users in a variety of ways including by reading cookies recognizing users’ previous history, session variables, server side variables etc., or by using direct interaction (form elements, mouseovers, etc.). A site can display the current state of a dialogue between users, monitor a changing situation, or provide information in some way personalized to the requirements of the individual user.

Some countries, for example the U.K. and the U.S., have introduced legislation regarding web accessibility.

Software systems

There are a wide range of software systems, such as Java Server Pages (JSP), the PHP and Perl programming languages, Active Server Pages (ASP), YUMA and Cold Fusion (CFM) that are available to generate dynamic web systems and dynamic sites. Sites may also include content that is retrieved from one or more databases or by using XML-based technologies such as RSS.

Static content may also be dynamically generated either periodically, or if certain conditions for regeneration occur (cached) in order to avoid the performance loss of initiating the dynamic engine on a per-user or per-connection basis.

Plug ins are available to expand the features and abilities of web browsers, which use them to show active content, such as Flash, Shockwave or applets written in Java. Dynamic HTML also provides for user interactivity and realtime element updating within web pages (i.e., pages don’t have to be loaded or reloaded to effect any changes), mainly using the DOM and JavaScript, support which is built-in to most modern web browsers.

Turning a website into an income source is a common practice for web developers and website owners. There are several methods for creating a website business which fall into two broad categories, as defined below.

Content-based sites

Some websites derive revenue by selling advertising space on the site (see contextual ads).

Product- or service-based sites

Some websites derive revenue by offering products or services for sale. In the case of e-commerce websites, the products or services may be purchased at the website itself, by entering credit card or other payment information into a payment form on the site. While most business websites serve as a shop window for existing brick and mortar businesses, it is increasingly the case that some websites are businesses in their own right; that is, the products they offer are only available for purchase on the web.

Websites occasionally derive income from a combination of these two practices. For example, a website such as an online auctions website may charge the users of its auction service to list an auction, but also display third-party advertisements on the site, from which it derives further income.

Spelling

As noted above, there are several different spellings for this term. Although website and web site are commonly used (the former especially in British English), the Associated Press Style book, Reuters, Microsoft, academia, book publishing, The Chicago Manual of Style, and dictionaries such as Merriam-Webster use the two-word, initially capitalized spelling Web site. This is because “Web” is not a general term but a shortened form of World Wide Web. As with many newly created terms, it may take some time before a common spelling is finalized. (This controversy also applies to derivative terms such as Web master/webmaster and Web cam/webcam).

The Canadian Oxford Dictionary and the Canadian Press Style book list “website” and “web page” as the preferred spellings. The Oxford English Dictionary began using “website” as its standardized form in 2004.^[3]

Bill Walsh, the copy chief of The Washington Post’s national desk, and one of American English’s foremost grammarians, argues for the two-word spelling with capital W in his books Lapsing into a Comma and The Elephants of Style, and on his site, the Slot.^[4]

Types of websites

There are many varieties of websites, each specializing in a particular type of content or use, and they may be arbitrarily classified in any number of ways. A few such classifications might include:^{[original research?]}

• Affiliate: enabled portal that renders not only its custom CMS but also syndicated content from other content providers for an agreed fee. There are usually three relationship tiers. Affiliate Agencies (e.g., Commission Junction), Advertisers (e.g., eBay) and consumer (e.g., Yahoo!).
• Archive site: used to preserve valuable electronic content threatened with extinction. Two examples are: Internet Archive, which since 1996 has preserved billions of old (and new) web pages; and Google Groups, which in early 2005 was archiving over 845,000,000 messages posted to Usenet news/discussion groups.
• Blog (or web log) site: sites generally used to post online diaries which may include discussion forums (e.g., blogger, Xanga).
• Content site: sites whose business is the creation and distribution of original content (e.g., Slate, About.com).
• Corporate website: used to provide background information about a business, organization, or service.
• Electronic commerce (eCommerce) site: a site offering goods and services for online sale and enabling online transactions for such sales.
• Community site: a site where persons with similar interests communicate with each other, usually by chat or message boards, such as MySpace or Facebook.
• City Site: A site that shows information about a certain city or town and events that takes place in that town. Usually created by the city council or other “movers and shakers”.

• the same as those of geographic entities, such as cities and countries. For example, Richmond.com is the geodomain for Richmond, Virginia.
• Gripe site: a site devoted to the critique of a person, place, corporation, government, or institution.
• Forum: a site where people can sign up and discuss different topics.
• Humor site: satirizes, parodies or otherwise exists solely to amuse.
• Information site: contains content that is intended to inform visitors, but not necessarily for commercial purposes, such as: RateMyProfessors.com, Free Internet Lexicon and Encyclopedia. Most government, educational and non-profit institutions have an informational site.
• Java applet site: contains software to run over the Web as a Web application.
• Mirror site: A complete reproduction of a website.
• News site: similar to an information site, but dedicated to dispensing news and commentary.
• Personal homepage: run by an individual or a small group (such as a family) that contains information or any content that the individual wishes to include. These are usually uploaded using a web hosting service such as Geocities.
• Phish site: a website created to fraudulently acquire sensitive information, such as passwords and credit card details, by masquerading as a trustworthy person or business (such as Social Security Administration, PayPal) in an electronic communication (see Phishing).
• Political site: A site on which people may voice political views.
• Porn site: A site that shows sexually explicit content for enjoyment and relaxation, most likely in the form of an internet gallery, dating site, blog, social networking, or video sharing.
• Rating site: A site on which people can praise or disparage what is featured.
• Review site: A site on which people can post reviews for products or services.
• School site: a site on which teachers, students, or administrators can post information about current events at or involving their school. U.S. elementary-high school websites generally use k12 in the URL, such as kearney.k12.mo.us.
• Social networking site: a site where users could communicate with one another and share media, such as pictures, videos, music, blogs, etc. with other users. These may include games and web applications.
• Social bookmarking site: a site where users share other content from the internet and rate and comment on the content. StumbleUpon and Digg are examples.
• Video sharing: A site that enables user to upload videos, such as YouTube and Google Video.
• Search engine site: a site that provides general information and is intended as a gateway or lookup for other sites. A pure example is Google, and the most widely known extended type is Yahoo!.
• Shock site: includes images or other material that is intended to be offensive to most viewers (e.g. rotten.com).
• Warez: a site designed to host and let users download copyrighted materials illegally.
• Web portal: a site that provides a starting point or a gateway to other resources on the Internet or an intranet.
• Wiki site: a site which users collaboratively edit (such as Wikipedia and Wikihow).

Some websites may be included in one or more of these categories. For example, a business website may promote the business’s products, but may also host informative documents, such as white papers. There are also numerous sub-categories to the ones listed above. For example, a porn site is a specific type of eCommerce site or business site (that is, it is trying to sell memberships for access to its site). A fan site may be a dedication from the owner to a particular celebrity.

Websites are constrained by architectural limits (e.g., the computing power dedicated to the website). Very large websites, such as Yahoo!, Microsoft, and Google employ many servers and load balancing equipment such as Cisco Content Services Switches to distribute visitor loads over multiple computers at multiple locations.

In February 2009, Netcraft, an Internet monitoring company that has tracked Web growth since 1995, reported that there were 215,675,903 websites with domain names and content on them in 2009, compared to just 18,000 websites in August 1995.

Bing (formerly Live Search, Windows Live Search, MSN Search) is the current web search engine (advertised as a “decision engine”)^[3] from Microsoft. Unveiled by Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer on May 28, 2009 at the All Things Digital conference in San Diego, Bing is a replacement for Live Search. It went fully online on June 3, 2009,^[4] with a preview version released on June 1, 2009. In its first few weeks Bing was successful in gaining some market share.^[5]

Notable changes include the listing of search suggestions in real time as queries are entered and a list of related searches (called “Explorer pane” on the left side of search results) based on semantic technology from Powerset,^[6] which Microsoft purchased in 2008.^[7] Bing also includes the ability to Save & Share search histories via Windows Live SkyDrive, Facebook and email.

On July 29, 2009, Microsoft and Yahoo! announced a deal in which Bing would power Yahoo! Search.^[8]

History

MSN Search

MSN Search homepage in 2006

MSN Search was a search engine by Microsoft that comprised a search engine, index, and web crawler. MSN Search first launched in the fall of 1998 and used search results from Inktomi. In early 1999, MSN Search launched a version which displayed listings from Looksmart blended with results from Inktomi except for a short time in 1999 when results from AltaVista were used instead. Since then Microsoft upgraded MSN Search to provide its own Microsoft-built search engine results (list of web addresses with samples of content that meet a user’s query), the index of which is updated weekly or even daily. The upgrade started as a beta program in November 2004 (based on several years of research), and came out of beta in February 2005. Image search was powered by a third party, Picsearch. The service also started providing its search results to other search engine portals in an effort to better compete in the market.

Windows Live Search

Windows Live Search homepage

The first public beta of Windows Live Search was unveiled on March 8, 2006, with the final release on September 11, 2006 replacing MSN Search. The new search engine offered users the ability to search for specific types of information using search tabs that include Web, news, images, music, desktop, local, and Microsoft Encarta. Windows Live Search aimed to make its over 2.5 billion worldwide queries each month “more useful by providing consumers with improved access to information and more precise answers to their questions.” A configuration menu is available to change the default search engine in Internet Explorer.

In the roll-over from MSN Search to Windows Live Search, Microsoft stopped using Picsearch as their image search provider and started performing their own image search, fueled by their own internal image search algorithms.^[9]

Live Search

Live Search homepage

On March 21, 2007, Microsoft announced that it would separate its search developments from the Windows Live services family, rebranding the service as Live Search. Live Search was integrated into the Live Search and Ad Platform headed by Satya Nadella, part of Microsoft’s Platform and Systems division. As part of this change, Live Search was consolidated with Microsoft adCenter.^[10]

A series of reorganisations and consolidations of Microsoft’s search offerings were made under the Live Search branding. On May 23, 2008, Microsoft announced the discontinuation of Live Search Books and Live Search Academic and integrated all academic and book search results into regular search, and as a result this also included the closure of Live Search Books Publisher Program. Soon after, Windows Live Expo was discontinued on July 31, 2008. Live Search Macros, a service which allowed users to create their own custom search engines or use macros created by other users, was also discontinued shortly after. On May 15 2009, Live Product Upload, a service which allowed merchants to upload products information onto Live Search Products, was discontinued. The final reorganisation came as Live Search QnA was rebranded as MSN QnA on February 18, 2009, however, it was subsequently discontinued on May 21, 2009.^[11]

Microsoft recognised that there would be a brand issue as long as the word “Live” remained in the name.^[12] As an effort to create a new identity for Microsoft’s search services, Live Search was officially replaced by Bing on June 3, 2009.^[13]

Yahoo! search deal

On July 29, 2009, Microsoft and Yahoo! announced that they had made a 10-year deal in which the Yahoo! search engine would be replaced by Bing. “Through this agreement with Yahoo!, we will create more innovation in search, better value for advertisers, and real consumer choice in a market currently dominated by a single company,” said Mr Ballmer. “I believe it establishes the foundation for a new era of internet innovation and development” Carol Bartz, Yahoo! chief executive. Yahoo! will get to keep 88% of the revenue from all search ad sales on its site for the first five years of the deal, and have the right to sell adverts on some Microsoft sites. Yahoo! Search will still maintain its own user interface, but will eventually feature “Powered by Bing” branding^[14][15]

Features

• Note many of these features are limited to when bing’s location is set to US (this can be done from any location)

Interface features

• Daily changing of background image. The images are mostly of remarkable places in the world. The background image also contains information about the element(s) shown in the image. You can view the information by hovering over the image. The background images can be switched off and switched on
• Content sectioning of results (separate section for wallpaper, map, weather, fansites and more)
• Left side navigation pane. Includes navigation and, on results pages, related searches and prior searches
• Right side extended preview which shows a bigger view of the page and gives URLs to links inside of the page.
• Sublinks. On certain search results, the search result page also shows section links within the article (this is also done on other search engines, including Google)
• Enhanced view where third party site information can be viewed inside Bing. This works for Wikipedia pages

Media features

• Video thumbnail Preview where, by hovering over a video thumbnail, the video automatically starts playing
• Image search with continuous scrolling images results page that has adjustable settings for size, layout, color, style and people.^[16]
• Video search with adjustable setting for length, screen size, resolution and source

Instant answers

• Sports. Bing can directly display scores from a specific day, recent scores from a league or scores and statistics on teams or players.
• Finance. When entering a company name or stock symbol and either stock or quote in the search box Bing will show direct stock information like a stockchart, price, volume, and p/e ratio^[17] in a webslice that users can subscribe to.
• Math calculations (e.g., 2 * pi * 24).^[18] Users can enter math expressions in the search box using a variety of math operators and (trig) functions^[19] and Bing will provide a direct calculation of the expression.
• Package tracking and tracing. When a user types the name of the shipping company and the tracking number Bing will provide direct tracking information.
• Plane ticket info. When ‘flights from (to)’ is entered in the search box in combination with city names or airport codes Bing provides info on ticket prices and a prediction for the future price trend.
• Flight status. When ‘flight status’ and/or a flight number is entered in the Bing search box, Bing provides direct current information on the flight status of the particular flight.
• Car info
• Celebrity rankings (xRank)
• Celebrity news
• Encyclopedic answers (What is the capital of Germany?). If the search phrase entered in the search box contains a simple question whose answer can be found in the Encarta encyclopia, Bing provides a direct answer to the question from Encarta.
• Dictionary. When ‘define’, ‘definition’ or ‘what is’ followed by a word is entered in the searchbox Bing will show a direct answer from the Encarta dictionary
• Spell check. Will change frequently misspelled search terms to the more commonly spelled alternative. This feature cannot be disabled or avoided.
• Best match (plus similar sites)
• Product shopping and Bing cashback
• Health info

Local info

• Current traffic info
• Business listing
• People listing
• Collections
• Localized searching for restaurants and services
• Restaurant reviews
• Movies played in an area. When a current movie title is entered in the search box Bing will provide listings of local theaters showing the movie. When a city is added to the search box, Bing provides the movie listings localised for that city.
• City hotel listings. When ‘hotels’ and a city name is entered in the search box Bing can provide hotel listings with a map. The listing leads to a detail search page with the hotels listed that holds extended information on the hotels and contains links to reviews, directions reservations and bird eye view of the hotel. On the page with the listings the list can be refined by settings on ratings, pricing, amenities, payment and parking

Integration with Hotmail

• With Hotmail’s “Quick Add” feature, users can insert derivatives of Bing search results such as restaurant reviews, movie times, images, videos, and maps directly into their e-mail messages.^[20]

Search products

In addition to its tool for searching webpages, Bing also provides the following search offerings:^[21]

Webmaster services

Bing allows webmasters to manage the web crawling status of their own websites through Bing Webmaster Center. Additionally, users may also submit contents to Bing via the following methods:

• Bing Local Listing Center allow businesses to add business listings onto Bing Maps and Bing Local
• Soapbox on MSN Video allow users to upload videos for searching via Bing Videos

Mobile services

Bing Mobile allow users to conduct search queries on their mobile devices, either via the mobile browser or a downloadable mobile application. In the United States, Microsoft also operates a toll-free number for directory assistance called Bing 411.^[21]

Other services

BingTweets is a service that combines Twitter trends with Bing search results, enabling users to see real-time information about the hottest topics on Twitter. The BingTweets service was initiated on July 14, 2009 in a partnership between Microsoft, Twitter and Federated Media.^[22]

Toolbars, gadgets and plug-ins

Toolbars

Both Windows Live Toolbar and MSN Toolbar will be powered by Bing and aim to offer users a way to access Bing search results. Together with the launch of Bing, MSN Toolbar 4.0 will be released with inclusion of new Bing-related features such as Bing cashback offer alerts.^[21]

Gadgets

Bing Windows Sidebar gadgets

Live Search Gadget was a Windows Sidebar gadget that uses Live Search to fetch the user’s search results and render them directly in the gadget. Another gadget, the Live Search Maps Gadget displayed real-time traffic conditions using Live Search Maps.^[23] The gadget provided shortcuts to driving directions, local search and full-screen traffic view. However, only traffic data from 23 selected US cities are supported, including Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, Denver, Detroit, Houston, Los Angeles, Milwaukee, New York, Oklahoma City, Philadelphia, Phoenix, Pittsburgh, Portland, Providence, Sacramento, Salt Lake City, San Diego, San Francisco, Seattle, St. Louis, Tampa, and Washington DC.

On October 30, 2007, both gadgets were removed from Windows Live Gallery due to possible security concerns.^[24] The Live Search Maps gadget was made available for download again on January 24, 2008 with the security concern addressed.^[25] However around the introduction of Bing in June 2009 both gadgets have been removed again for download from Windows Live Gallery.

Microsoft created several accelerator and webslice addons for using Bing directly from your browser.

Accelerators

Accelerators allow users to access Bing features directly from selected text in a webpage. Accelerators provided by the Bing team include:

• Bing Translator
• Bing Maps
• Bing Shopping

Web Slices

Web Slices can be used to monitor information gathered by Bing. Web Slices provided by the Bing team include:

• Weather from Bing
• Finance from Bing
• Traffic from Bing

Plug-ins

The Bing team provides an official Bing Firefox add-on, which adds search suggestions to the Firefox search box from Bing.^[26]

Advertising

Live Search

Since 2006, Microsoft had conducted a number of tie-ins and promotions for promoting Microsoft’s search offerings. These include:

• Amazon‘s A9 search service and the experimental Ms. Dewey interactive search site syndicated all search results from Microsoft’s then search engine, Live Search. This tie-in started on May 1, 2006.
• Search and Give – a promotional website launched on 17 January 2007 where all searches done from a special portal site would lead to a donation to the UNHCR‘s organization for refugee children, ninemillion.org. Reuters AlertNet reported in 2007 that the amount to be donated would be $0.01 per search, with a minimum of $100,000 and a maximum of $250,000 (equivalent to 25 million searches).^[27] According to the website the service was decommissioned on June 1, 2009, having donated over $500,000 to charity and schools.^[28]
• Live Search Club – a promotional website where users can win prizes by playing word games that generate search queries on Microsoft’s then search service Live Search. This website began in April 2007 and has since been renamed as Club Bing
• Big Snap Search – a promotional website similar to Live Search Club. This website began in February 2008, but was discontinued shortly after.^[29]
• Live Search SearchPerks! – a promotional website which allowed users to redeem tickets for prizes while using Microsoft’s search engine. This website began on October 1, 2008 and was decommissioned on April 15, 2009.

Bing

Bing’s debut features a $80 to $100 million online, TV, print, and radio advertising campaign in the US. The advertisements do not mention other search engines competitors, such as Google and Yahoo, directly by name; rather, they attempt to convince users to switch to Bing by focusing on Bing’s search features and functionality.^[30] The ads claim that Bing does a better job countering “search overload,” offering more-relevant, higher-quality results.^[31]

Name origin

The word “bing” is an onomatopoeia, a word that imitates the sound it represents. Through focus groups Microsoft decided that the name Bing was memorable, short, easy to spell, and that it would function well as a URL around the world. The word would remind people of the sound made during “the moment of discovery and decision making.”^[32] Microsoft was assisted by branding consultancy Interbrand in their search for the best name for the new search engine.^[33]

Qi Lu, president of Microsoft Online Services, also announced that Bing’s official Chinese name is bì yìng (simplified Chinese: 必应; traditional Chinese: 必應), which literally means “very certain to respond” or “very certain to answer” in Chinese.^[34]

While being tested internally by Microsoft employees, Bing’s codename was Kumo,^[35] which came from the Japanese word for spider as well as cloud, referring to the manner in which search engines “spider” Internet resources to add them to their database, as well as cloud computing.

Bing is often referred to as a recursive acronym for BING Is Not Google.^{[36][37][38][39][40]}

On the other hand, critics such as Seth Godin have criticized Microsoft for simply using the recent renaming of the search engine to grab attention from Google, the more popular search engine, dubbing it But It’s Not Google.^[41]

BongoBing^[42], a trademark of The Laptop Company, Inc. released on July 31, 2009 a press release stating that it is challenging Bing’s trademark application, because Bing is causing confusion in the marketplace as BongoBing and Bing both do online product search: “BongoBingTM to Challenge Microsoft’s Bing Trademark Application“.^[43] The Trademark Trial and Appeal Board (TTAB) has issued an order granting the extension to challenge Microsoft’s Bing.^[44]TechCrunch and many other online news outlets published the breaking news stimulating debate on the issue from the online community.^[45]

Adult content

Video content

Bing’s video search tool has a preview mode that could potentially be used to preview pornographic videos.^[46] By simply turning off safe search, users can search for and view pornographic videos by hovering the cursor over a thumbnail, since the videos and audio in some cases is cached on Microsoft’s Server^{[citation needed]}

Since the videos are playing within Bing instead of the site where they are hosted, the videos are not necessarily blocked by parental control filters. Monitoring programs designed to tell parents what sites their children have visited are likely to simply report “Bing.com” instead of the site that actually hosts the video. The same situation can be said about corporate filters, many of which have been fooled by this feature.^[47] Users do not need to leave Bing’s site to view these videos.^[48][49]

Microsoft responded in a blog post on June 4, 2009, with a short term work-around.^[50] By adding “&adlt=strict” to the end of a query, no matter what the settings are for that session it will return results as if safe search was set to strict. The query would look like this: http://www.bing.com/videos/search?q=adulttermgoeshere&adlt=strict (case sensitive).

On June 12, 2009, Microsoft announced two changes regarding Bing’s Smart Motion Preview and SafeSearch features. All potentially explicit images and video content will be coming from a separate single domain, explicit.bing.net. Additionally, Bing will also return source URL information in the query string for image and video contents. Both changes allow both home users and corporate users to filter content by domain regardless of what the SafeSearch settings might be.^[51]

Regional censorship

Bing censors results for adult search terms like “sex” for some of the regions including People’s Republic of China, Germany and Arabian countries.^[52] This censoring is done based on the local laws of those countries.^[53] However, Bing allows users to simply change their country/region preference to somewhere without restrictions – such as the United States, United Kingdom or Australia – to sidestep this censorship.

Chinese Censorship

Bing censors Chinese results by language, not location; a search for “Tiananmen” in Simplified Chinese (used mainly in mainland China) does not return results on the killings on June 4, 1989, even if submitted from North America or Europe. Traditional Chinese (used mainly in Taiwan) and other languages are not affected.

Yahoo! was founded by Jerry Yang and David Filo in January 1994 and was incorporated on March 1, 1995.

On January 13, 2009, Yahoo! appointed Carol Bartz, former executive chairperson of Autodesk, as its new chief executive officer and a member of the board of directors.^[4]

According to Web traffic analysis companies (including Compete.com, comScore,^[5] Alexa Internet,^[6] Netcraft,^[7] and Nielsen Ratings^[8]), the domain yahoo.com attracted at least 1.575 billion visitors annually by 2008.^[9] The global network of Yahoo! websites receives 3.4 billion page views per day on average as of October 2007^[update]. It is the second most visited website in the world in May 2009.^[10]

History and growth

Early history (1994–1999)

Yahoo! co-founders Jerry Yang (left) and David Filo (right)

In January 1994, Jerry Yang and David Filo were Electrical Engineering graduate students at Stanford University. In April 1994, “Jerry and David’s Guide to the World Wide Web” was renamed “Yahoo!”, for which the official expansion is “Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle”.^[11][12] Filo and Yang said they selected the name because they liked the word’s general definition, which comes from Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift: “rude, unsophisticated and uncouth”.^[13] Its URL was akebono.stanford.edu/yahoo.^[14]

The Yahoo! domain was created on January 18, 1995.^[15] Yang and Filo realized their website had massive business potential, and on March 1, 1995, Yahoo! was incorporated.^[16] On April 5, 1995, Michael Moritz of Sequoia Capital provided Yahoo! with two rounds of venture capital, raising approximately $3 million.^[17][18] On April 12, 1996, Yahoo! had its initial public offering, raising $33.8 million, by selling 2.6 million shares at $13 each.

Like many web 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.

On March 8, 1997, Yahoo acquired online communications company Four11. Four11′s webmail service, RocketMail, became Yahoo! Mail. Yahoo! also acquired ClassicGames.com and turned it into Yahoo! Games. Yahoo! then acquired direct marketing company Yoyodyne Entertainment, Inc. on October 12. On March 8, 1998, Yahoo! launched Yahoo! Pager,^[19] an instant messaging service that was renamed Yahoo! Messenger a year later. On January 28, 1999, Yahoo! acquired web hosting provider GeoCities. Another company Yahoo! acquired was eGroups, which became Yahoo! Groups after the acquisition on June 28, 2000.

When acquiring companies, Yahoo! often changed the relevant terms of service. For example, they claimed intellectual property rights for content on their servers, unlike the companies they acquired. As a result, many of the acquisitions were controversial and unpopular with users of the existing services.^{[clarification needed]}

Yahoo! headquarters in Sunnyvale

Dot-com bubble (2000–2001)

Yahoo! stock doubled in price in the last month of 1999.^[20] On January 3, 2000, at the height of the Dot-com boom, Yahoo! stocks closed at an all-time high of $118.75 a share. Sixteen days later, shares in Yahoo! Japan became the first stocks in Japanese history to trade at over ¥100,000,000, reaching a price of ¥101.4 million ($94,780 at that time).^[21]

On February 7, 2000, the Yahoo! domain was brought to a halt for a few hours as it was the victim of a distributed denial of service attack (DDoS).^[22] On the next day, its shares rose about $16, or 4.5 percent as the failure was blamed on hackers rather than on an internal glitch, unlike a fault with eBay earlier that year.

During the dot-com boom, the cable news station CNBC also reported that Yahoo! and eBay were discussing a 50/50 merger.^[23] Although the merger never materialized the two companies decided to form a marketing/advertising alliance six years later in 2006.^[24]

On June 26, 2000, Yahoo! and Google signed an agreement which retained Google as the default worldwide-web search engine for Yahoo! following a beta trial in 1999.^[25]

Post dot-com bubble (2002–2009)

Yahoo! was one of the surviving large Internet companies after the dot-com bubble burst. Nevertheless, on September 26, 2001, Yahoo! stocks closed at a five-year low of $4.06 (split-adjusted).

Yahoo! formed partnerships with telecommunications and Internet providers to create content-rich broadband services to compete with AOL. On June 3, 2002, SBC and Yahoo! launched a national co-branded dial-up Internet access service.^[26] In July 2003, BT Group Openworld announced an alliance with Yahoo!.^[27] On August 23, 2005, Yahoo! and Verizon Communications launched an integrated DSL service.^[28]

In late 2002, Yahoo! began to bolster its search services by acquiring other search engines. In December 2002, Yahoo! acquired Inktomi Corporation. In February 2005, Yahoo! acquired Konfabulator and rebranded it Yahoo! Widgets,^[29] a desktop application and in July 2003, it acquired Overture Services, Inc. and its subsidiaries AltaVista and AlltheWeb. On February 18, 2004, Yahoo! dropped Google-powered results and returned to using its own technology to provide search results.

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. On July 9, 2004, Yahoo! acquired e-mail provider Oddpost to add an Ajax interface to Yahoo! Mail.^[30] On October 13, 2005, Yahoo! and Microsoft announced that Yahoo! Messenger and MSN Messenger would become interoperable. In 2007, Yahoo! took out the storage meters, thus allowing users unlimited storage.

Yahoo! continued acquiring companies to expand its range of services, particularly Web 2.0 services. Yahoo! Launchcast became Yahoo! Music on February 9, 2005. On March 20, 2005, Yahoo! purchased photo sharing service Flickr.^[31] On March 29, 2005, the company launched its blogging and social networking service Yahoo! 360°. In June 2005, Yahoo! acquired blo.gs, a service based on RSS feed aggregation. Yahoo! then bought online social event calendar Upcoming.org on October 4, 2005. Yahoo! acquired social bookmark site del.icio.us on December 9, 2005 and then playlist sharing community Webjay on January 9, 2006.

On August 27, 2007, Yahoo! released a new version of Yahoo! Mail. It adds Yahoo! Messenger integration. (which includes Windows Live Messenger due to the networks’ federation) and free text messages (not necessarily free to the receiver) to mobile phones in the U.S., Canada, India and the Philippines.^[32]

On January 29, 2008, Yahoo! announced that the company was laying off 1,000 employees as the company had suffered severely in its inability to effectively compete with industry search leader Google. The cuts represent 7 percent of the company’s workforce of 14,300. Employees are being invited to apply for an unknown number of new positions that are expected to open as the company expands areas that promise faster growth.^[33]

In February, 2008, Yahoo! acquired Cambridge, Massachusetts-based Maven Networks, a supplier of internet video players and video advertising tools, for approx. $160 million.

Yahoo! announced on November 17, 2008 that Yang would be stepping down as CEO.^[34]

On December 10, 2008, Yahoo! began laying off 1,520 employees around the world as the company managed its way through the global economic downturn.^[35] By carefully managing expenses, Yahoo has remained one of the most profitable pure-Internet companies in the world^[36] , and maintains billions of dollars on its balance sheet^[37], despite continued “softness” in the advertising world.

Acquisition attempt by Microsoft

Microsoft and Yahoo! pursued merger discussions in 2005, 2006, and 2007, that were all ultimately unsuccessful. At the time, analysts were skeptical about the wisdom of a business combination.^[38][39]

On February 1, 2008, after its friendly takeover offer was rebuffed by Yahoo!, Microsoft made an unsolicited takeover bid to buy Yahoo! for US$44.6 billion in cash and stock.^[40][41] Days later, Yahoo! considered alternatives to the merger with Microsoft, including a merger with internet giant Google^[42] or a potential transaction with News Corp.^[43] However, on February 11, 2008, Yahoo! decided to reject Microsoft’s offer as “substantially undervaluing” Yahoo!’s brand, audience, investments, and growth prospects.^[44] As of February 22, two Detroit based pension companies have sued Yahoo! and their board of directors for breaching their duty to shareholders by opposing Microsoft’s takeover bid and pursuing “value destructive” third-party deals.^{[45][dead link]} In early March, Google CEO Eric Schmidt went on record saying that he was concerned that a potential Microsoft-Yahoo! merger might hurt the Internet by compromising its openness.^[46] The value of Microsoft’s cash and stock offer declined with Microsoft’s stock price, falling to $42.2 billion by April 4.^[47] On April 5, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer sent a letter to Yahoo!’s board of directors stating that if within three weeks they had not accepted the deal, Microsoft would approach shareholders directly in hopes of a electing a new board and moving forward with merger talks; this is known as a hostile takeover.^{[48][dead link]} In response, Yahoo! stated on April 7 that they were not against a merger, but that they wanted a better offer. In addition, they stated that Microsoft’s “aggressive” approach was worsening their relationship and the chances of a “friendly” merger.^[49] Later the same day, Yahoo! stated that the original $45 billion offer was not acceptable.^[49] Following this, there has been considerable discussion of having Time Warner‘s AOL and Yahoo! merge, instead of the originally proposed Microsoft deal.^[50]

On May 3, 2008, Microsoft withdrew their offer. During a meeting between Ballmer and Yang, Microsoft had offered to raise its offer by $5 billion to $33 per share, while Yahoo! demanded $37. One of Ballmer’s lieutenants suggested that Yang would implement a poison pill to make the takeover as difficult as possible, saying “They are going to burn the furniture if we go hostile. They are going to destroy the place.”^[51][52]

Analysts say that Yahoo!’s shares, which closed at $28.67 on May 2, are likely to drop below $25 and perhaps as low as $20 on May 5, which would put significant pressure on Yang to engineer a turnaround of the company. Some suggest that institutional investors would file lawsuits against Yahoo!’s board of directors for not acting in shareholder interest by refusing Microsoft’s offer.^[53][54]

On May 5, 2008, following Microsoft’s withdrawal Yahoo!’s stock plunged some 15% lower to $23.02 in Monday trading and trimmed about $6 billion off of its market capitalization.^[55]

After Microsoft’s failed bid to acquire Yahoo!, Microsoft is rumored to be looking at acquiring LiveDoor, a leading Japanese portal and the leading blogging service in Japan, to strengthen its position against Yahoo! Japan.

On June 12, 2008, Yahoo announced that it had ended all talks with Microsoft about purchasing either part of the business (the search advertising business) or all of the company. Talks had taken place the previous weekend (June 8), during which Microsoft allegedly told Yahoo that it was no longer interested in a purchase of the entire company at the price offered earlier — $33/share. Also on June 12, Yahoo announced a non-exclusive search advertising alliance with Google.^[56] Upon this announcement, many executives and senior employees have announced their plans to leave the company as it appears that they have lost confidence in Yahoo’s strategies. According to market analysts, these pending departures are also impacting Wall Street‘s perception of the company. ^[57]

On July 7, 2008, Microsoft said it would reconsider proposing another bid for Yahoo if the company’s nine directors were ousted at the annual meeting scheduled to be held on August 1, 2008. Microsoft believes it would be able to better negotiate with a new board.^[58]

Billionaire investor Carl Icahn, calling the current board irrational in its approach to talks with Microsoft, launched a proxy fight to replace Yahoo’s board. On July 21, 2008 Yahoo settled with Carl Icahn, agreeing to appoint him and two allies to an expanded board.

On November 20, 2008, almost 10 months after Microsoft’s initial offer of $33 per share, Yahoo’s stock (YHOO) dropped to a 52-week low, trading at only $8.94 per share.^[59]

On November 30, 2008, Microsoft offered to buy Yahoo’s Search business for $20 billion.^[60]

On July 29, 2009, it was announced with a 10 year deal that Microsoft will have full access to Yahoo search engine to be used in Microsoft future projects for its search engine Bing. ^[61] Under the deal, Microsoft was not required to pay any cash up front to Yahoo. The day after the deal was announced, Yahoo’s share price declined more than 10% to $15.14, about 60% lower than Microsoft’s takeover bid a year earlier.

Products and services

Main article: List of Yahoo-owned sites and services

Yahoo! provides a wide array of internet services that cater to most online activities. It operates the web portal http://www.yahoo.com which provides content including the latest news, entertainment, and sports information, and gives users quick access to other Yahoo! services like Yahoo! Mail, Yahoo! Maps, Yahoo! Finance, Yahoo! Groups and Yahoo! Messenger. The majority of the product offerings are available globally in more than 20 languages.

Storing personal information

As of December 11, 2007, Google and the Microsoft’s Live Search “store personal information for 18 months” and Yahoo! and AOL (Time Warner) “retain search requests for 13 months”.^[62]

Communication

Yahoo! provides internet communication services such as Yahoo! Mail and Yahoo! Messenger, Yahoo! Mail is the largest e-mail service in the world with almost half the market share.^[63] In March, 2007, Yahoo! announced that their email service will offer unlimited storage beginning May 2007.^[64]

Yahoo! Mail premium service MailPlus provides additional functionality including POP/SMTP access to Yahoo! Mail accounts, although such functionality is already provided for free by Yahoo! competitor Gmail. Some MailPlus subscribers have reported difficulties in successfully cancelling their Mailplus (automatically renewed and paid by credit card) subscriptions. Although other areas of the Mailplus web interface appear to function correctly, a blank page appears when users select “cancel service” from the list of options to manage the service. It is unknown whether this error has been an accidental oversight by Yahoo! programmers, or a deliberate attempt to retain Mailplus subscription cash flows as long as possible.

Yahoo! also offers social networking services and user-generated content in products such as My Web, Yahoo! Personals, Yahoo! 360°, Flickr and Yahoo! Buzz.

Yahoo! Photos was shut down on September 20, 2007 in favor of Flickr. On October 16, 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.^[65]

Content

Yahoo! partners with hundreds of premier content providers in products such as Yahoo! Sports, Yahoo! Finance, Yahoo! Music, Yahoo! Movies, Yahoo! News, Yahoo! Answers 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.

On March 31, 2008 Yahoo! launched web portal shine.yahoo.com another Yahoo! property dedicated to women between the ages of 25 and 54. Yahoo! called this demographic underserved by current Yahoo! properties.

Co-branded Internet services

Yahoo! has developed partnerships with different broadband providers such as AT&T (via BellSouth & SBC), Verizon Communications, Rogers Communications and British Telecom, offering a range of free and premium Yahoo! content and services to subscribers.

Mobile

Yahoo! Mobile includes services for on-the-go messaging, such as email, instant messaging, and mobile blogging; information, such as search and alerts; and fun and games, including ring tones, mobile games, and Yahoo! Photos for camera phones. These require software to be installed on the user’s device.

oneSearch

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.

The results of a Web search are listed on a single page and are prioritized into categories. The list of results is based on calculations that Yahoo! computers make on certain information the user is seeking.^[66]

Yahoo! has announced they also plan to adopt Novarra‘s mobile content transcoding service for the oneSearch platform.^[67]

Commerce

Yahoo! offers commerce services such as Yahoo! Shopping, Yahoo! Autos, Yahoo! Real Estate and Yahoo! Travel, which enables users to gather relevant information and make commercial transactions and purchases online. In addition, Yahoo! offers an e-commerce platform called Yahoo! Merchant Solutions (also known as Yahoo! Store) and hosts more Top 500 internet retailers than any other hosted e-commerce solution. Yahoo! Auctions were discontinued in 2007 except for Asia. ^[68]

Small business

Yahoo! provides services such as Yahoo! Domains, Yahoo! Web Hosting, Yahoo! Merchant Solutions, Yahoo! Business Email, and Yahoo! Store to small business owners and professionals allowing them to build their own online stores using Yahoo!’s tools.

Yahoo! also offers HotJobs to help recruiters find the talent they seek.

Advertising

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.^[69]

Yahoo! launched its new Internet advertisement sales system on February 5, 2007 called Panama. It allows advertisers to bid for search terms based on their popularity to display their ads on search results pages. The system takes bids, ad quality, click-through rates and other factors into consideration in determining how ads are ranked on search results pages. Through Panama, Yahoo! aims to provide more relevant search results to users, a better overall experience, as well as increase monetization—to earn more from the ads it shows.^[70]

On April 7, 2008, Yahoo! announced Yahoo! AMP!, an online advertising management platform.^[71] The platform seeks to simplify advertising sales by unifying buyer and seller markets. The service is scheduled for release in quarter 3 of 2008.

Yahoo! Next

Yahoo! Next is an incubation ground for future Yahoo! technologies currently in their beta testing phase. It contains forums for Yahoo! users to give feedback to assist in the development of these future Yahoo! technologies.

Yahoo! BOSS

Yahoo! Search BOSS is a new service that allows developers to build search applications based on Yahoo!’s search technology.^[72] Early Partners in the program include Hakia, Me.dium, Delver and Daylife.^[73]

Revenue model

About 88% of total revenues for the fiscal year 2006 came from marketing services. The largest segment of it comes from search advertising, where advertisers bid for search terms to display their ads on the search results, on average Yahoo! makes 2.5 cents to 3 cents from each search. With the new search advertising system “Panama” Yahoo! aims to increase revenue generated from search.^[74]

Other forms of advertising which bring in revenue for Yahoo! include display and contextual advertising.

Working with comScore, The New York Times found that Yahoo! is able to collect far more data about Web users than its competitors from its Web sites and its advertising network. By one measure, on average Yahoo! had the potential in December 2007 to build a profile of 2,500 records per month about each of its visitors.^[75]

Criticism and controversy

Nazi memorabilia controversy

In 2000 Yahoo was taken to court in France by parties seeking to prevent French citizens from purchasing memorabilia relating to the Nazi Party. Yahoo France had already instituted policies preventing the sale of Nazi memorabilia on its site, and prohibiting Nazi based discussions on its message boards, but the parties sought to have Yahoo introduce censorship technology to block French citizens from accessing similar material on Yahoo’s websites in countries where local laws permitted Nazi related auctions/discussions. ^[76]

Yahoo! paid inclusion controversy

In March 2004, Yahoo! launched a paid inclusion program whereby commercial websites are guaranteed listings on the Yahoo! search engine after payment.^[77] 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).^[78] 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.

Adware and spyware

Yahoo! has also been criticized for providing ads via the Yahoo ad network to companies who display them through spyware and adware which display on-screen pop-ups, generated from adware that a user may have installed on their computer without realizing it, sometimes by accepting online offers to download software to fix computer clocks or improve computer security, add browser enhancements, etc. As an example, users who have allowed their machine to become infected with spyware will see advertising pop-ups generated from advertising distributor Walnut Ventures, who had a direct partnership with Direct Revenue.^[79][80]

Work in the People’s Republic of China

Yahoo!, along with Google China, Microsoft, Cisco Systems, AOL, Skype, Nortel and others, has cooperated with the Chinese government in implementing a system of internet censorship in mainland China.

Unlike Google or Microsoft, which keep confidential records of its users outside mainland China, Yahoo! stated that the company will not protect the privacy and confidentiality of its Chinese customers from the authorities.^[82]

Human rights advocates such as Human Rights Watch and media groups such as Reporters Without Borders state that it is “ironic that companies whose existence depends on freedom of information and expression have taken on the role of censor.”^[83]

Imprisonment of Chinese dissidents

Shi Tao

Main article: Shi Tao

In September 2005, Reporters Without Borders reported the following story. 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 “secrets” were 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.^[84]

The verdict as published by the Chinese government stated the following. Shi Tao had sent the email through an anonymous Yahoo! account. Yahoo! Holdings (the Hong Kong subsidiary of Yahoo) told the Chinese government that the IP address used to send the email was registered by the Hunan newspaper that Shi Tao worked for. Police went straight to his offices and picked him up.

In February 2006, Yahoo! General Counsel submitted a statement to the U.S. Congress in which Yahoo! denied knowing the true nature of the case against Shi Tao.^[85] In April 2006, Yahoo! Holdings (Hong Kong) was investigated by Hong Kong‘s Privacy Commissioner for Personal Data.

On 2 June 2006, the union representing journalists in the UK and Ireland (National Union of Journalists) called on its 40,000 members to boycott all Yahoo! Inc. products and services to protest the Internet company’s reported actions in China.^[86]

In July 2007, evidence surfaced detailing the warrant which the Chinese authorities sent to Yahoo! officials, highlighting “State Secrets” as the charge against Shi Tao. The warrant requests “Email account registration information for huoyan1989@yahoo.com.cn, all login times, corresponding IP addresses, and relevant email content from February 22, 2004 to present.”^[87][88][89] Analyst reports and human rights organizations have said that this evidence directly contradicts Yahoo!’s testimony before the U.S. Congress in February 2006.^[90]

Yahoo! contends it must respect the laws of governments in jurisdictions where it is operating.

Li Zhi

Main article: Li Zhi (dissident)

Criticism of Yahoo! intensified in February 2006 when Reporters Without Borders released Chinese court documents stating that Yahoo! aided Chinese authorities in the case of dissident Li Zhi. In December 2003 Li Zhi was sentenced to 8 years imprisonment for “inciting subversion“.

Sued in US court for outing Chinese dissident Wang Xiaoning

Main article: Wang Xiaoning

Wang Xiaoning is a Chinese dissident from Shenyang who was arrested by authorities of the People’s Republic of China for publishing controversial material online.

In 2000 and 2001, Wang, who was an engineer by profession, posted electronic journals in a Yahoo! group calling for democratic reform and an end to single-party rule. He was arrested in September 2002 after Yahoo! assisted Chinese authorities by providing information. In September 2003, Wang was convicted of charges of “incitement to subvert state power” and sentenced to ten years in prison.^[92]

On April 18, 2007, Xiaoning’s wife Yu Ling sued Yahoo! under human rights laws in federal court in San Francisco, California, United States.^[93] Wang Xiaoning is named as a plaintiff in the Yahoo! suit, which was filed with help from the World Organization for Human Rights USA. “Yahoo! is guilty of ‘an act of corporate irresponsibility,’” said Morton Sklar, executive director of the group. “Yahoo! had reason to know that if they provided China with identification information that those individuals would be arrested.”^[94]

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:

The suit says that in 2001, Wang was using a Yahoo! e-mail account to post anonymous writings to an Internet mailing list. The suit alleges that Yahoo!, under pressure from the Chinese government, blocked that account. Wang set up a new account via Yahoo! and began sending material again; the suit alleges that Yahoo! gave the government information that allowed it to identify and arrest Wang in September 2002. The suit says prosecutors in the Chinese courts cited Yahoo!’s cooperation.^[94]

Human rights organizations groups are basing their case on a 217-year-old U.S. law to punish corporations for human rights violations abroad, an effort the Bush administration has opposed:

In recent years, activists working with overseas plaintiffs have sued roughly two dozen businesses under the Alien Tort Statute, which the activists say grants jurisdiction to American courts over acts abroad that violate international norms. Written by the Founding Fathers in 1789 for a different purpose, the law was rarely invoked until the 1980s.^[94]

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.^[95]

On November 6, 2007, the US congressional panel criticized Yahoo! for not giving full details to the House Foreign Affairs Committee the previous year, stating it had been “at best inexcusably negligent” and at worst “deceptive”.^[96]

Chatrooms and message boards

As a result of media scrutiny relating to Internet child predators and a lack of significant ad revenues, Yahoo!’s “user created” chatrooms were closed down in June 2005.^[97] Yahoo! News’ message board section was closed December 19, 2006, due to the trolling phenomenon.^[98]

Image search

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”.^[99]

Shark finning controversy

Yahoo! is a 40% owner of Alibaba, which facilitates the sale of shark-derived products.^[100] After investing in Alibaba, Yahoo! executives were asked about this issue, and responded: “We know the sale of shark products is both legal in Asia and a centuries-old tradition. This issue is largely a cultural-practices one.”^[101] However, the “cultural” claim (which is pushed by the trade, as in this article about Disney continuing to offer shark’s fin soup)^[102] has been contested.^[103] As a minority-owner of Alibaba, Yahoo! is not able to directly control that company’s actions in China.

Financial data

Yahoo! International

Yahoo! is known across the world with its multi-lingual interface. The site is available in over 20 languages, including English. The official directory for all of the Yahoo! International sites is world.yahoo.com.

Each of the international sites are wholly-owned by Yahoo!, with the exception of Yahoo! Japan¹, in which it holds a 34.79% minority stake[1] and Yahoo!7 in Australia which is a 50-50 agreement between Yahoo! and The Seven Network. Historically, Yahoo! entered into joint venture agreements with Softbank for the major European sites² (UK, France, Germany) and well as Korea and Japan. In November 2005, Yahoo! purchased the minority interests that Softbank owned in Europe and Korea.

Yahoo! hold a state 40% stake of Alibaba, which manages a web portal in China using the Yahoo! brand name. Yahoo! in the USA does not have direct control over the operations of Alibaba, which operates as a completely independent company.

Yahoo! Logos & Themes

There are many Yahoo! Logos, which come in many different colors and shapes.^[105] The first logo was used when the company was founded in 1995; it was red, and it had three icons on each side of it. Even though the official logo is purple.^[106]

The logo used on the main page yahoo.com used to be red with a black outline and shadow, but in May 2009, it was changed; its now purple, with a new theme design. Most of the old red Yahoo! logos had a black outline with a shadow, but the new logos usually don’t have that anymore.

Sometimes, the logo is abbreviated with Y!.^[105]

Themes and Designs are different on every Yahoo! Homepage (different countries). You would have seen a difference of the themes & design if you would go to for example; yahoo.com yahoo.co.uk au.yahoo.com etc.

Google was founded by Larry Page and Sergey Brin while they were students at Stanford University and the company was first incorporated as a privately held company on September 4, 1998. The initial public offering took place on August 19, 2004, raising $1.67 billion, implying a value for the entire corporation of $23 billion. Google has continued its growth through a series of new product developments, acquisitions, and partnerships. Environmentalism, philanthropy and positive employee relations have been important tenets during the growth of Google. The company has been identified multiple times as Fortune Magazine‘s #1 Best Place to Work,^[5] and as the most powerful brand in the world^[6] (according to the Millward Brown Group).

Google’s mission is “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful”.^[7] The unofficial company slogan, coined by former employee and Gmail‘s first engineer^[8] Paul Buchheit, is “Don’t be evil“.^[9][10][11] Criticism of Google includes concerns regarding the privacy of personal information, copyright, and censorship.

History

Main article: History of Google

Google in 1998

The first iteration of Google production servers was built with inexpensive hardware and was designed to be very fault-tolerant

Google began in January 1996, as a research project by Larry Page, who was soon joined by Sergey Brin, when they were both PhD students at Stanford University in California.^[12] They hypothesized that a search engine that analyzed the relationships between websites would produce better ranking of results than existing techniques, which ranked results according to the number of times the search term appeared on a page.^[13] Their search engine was originally nicknamed “BackRub” because the system checked backlinks to estimate the importance of a site.^[14][15] A small search engine called Rankdex was already exploring a similar strategy.^[16]

Convinced that the pages with the most links to them from other highly relevant web pages must be the most relevant pages associated with the search, Page and Brin tested their thesis as part of their studies, and laid the foundation for their search engine. Originally, the search engine used the Stanford University website with the domain google.stanford.edu. The domain google.com was registered on 15 September 1997,^[17] and the company was incorporated as Google Inc. on 4 September 1998 at a friend’s garage in Menlo Park, California. The total initial investment raised for the new company amounted to almost $1.1 million, including a $100,000 check by Andy Bechtolsheim, one of the founders of Sun Microsystems.^[18]

In March 1999, the company moved into offices in Palo Alto, home to several other noted Silicon Valley technology startups.^[19] After quickly outgrowing two other sites, the company leased a complex of buildings in Mountain View at 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway from Silicon Graphics (SGI) in 2003.^[20] The company has remained at this location ever since, and the complex has since come to be known as the Googleplex (a play on the word googolplex). In 2006, Google bought the property from SGI for $319 million.^[21]

The Google search engine attracted a loyal following among a growing number of Internet users, who liked its simple design and useful results.^[22] In 2000, Google began selling advertisements associated with search keywords.^[12] The ads were text-based to maintain an uncluttered page design and to maximize page loading speed.^[12] Keywords were sold based on a combination of price bid and clickthroughs, with bidding starting at 5 cents per click.^[12] This model of selling keyword advertising was pioneered by Goto.com (later renamed Overture Services, before being acquired by Yahoo! and rebranded as Yahoo! Search Marketing).^[23][24][25] Goto.com was an Idealab spin off created by Bill Gross, and was the first company to successfully provide a pay-for-placement search service. Overture Services later sued Google over alleged infringements of Overture’s pay-per-click and bidding patents by Google’s AdWords service. The case was settled out of court, with Google agreeing to issue shares of common stock to Yahoo! in exchange for a perpetual license.^[26] Thus, while many of its dot-com rivals failed in the new Internet marketplace, Google quietly rose in stature while generating revenue.^[12]

The name “Google” originated from a common misspelling of the word “googol“,^[27][28] which refers to 10¹⁰⁰, the number represented by a 1 followed by one hundred zeros. Having found its way increasingly into everyday language, the verb “google“, was added to the Merriam Webster Collegiate Dictionary and the Oxford English Dictionary in 2006, meaning “to use the Google search engine to obtain information on the Internet.”^[29][30]

A patent describing part of the Google ranking mechanism (PageRank) was granted on 4 September 2001.^[31] The patent was officially assigned to Stanford University and lists Lawrence Page as the inventor.

Financing and initial public offering

The first funding for Google as a company was secured in August 1998, in the form of a $100,000 contribution from Andy Bechtolsheim, co-founder of Sun Microsystems, given to a corporation which did not yet exist.^[32]

On June 7, 1999 a round of funding of $25 million was announced,^[33] with the major investors being rival venture capital firms Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and Sequoia Capital.^[32]

The Google IPO took place on 19 August 2004. 19,605,052 shares were offered at a price of $85 per share.^[34][35] Of that, 14,142,135 (another mathematical reference as √2 ≈ 1.4142135) were floated by Google, and the remaining 5,462,917 were offered by existing stockholders. The sale of $1.67 billion gave Google a market capitalization of more than $23 billion.^[36] The vast majority of the 271 million shares remained under the control of Google. Many Google employees became instant paper millionaires. Yahoo!, a competitor of Google, also benefited from the IPO because it owned 8.4 million shares of Google as of 9 August 2004, ten days before the IPO.^[37]

The stock performance of Google after its first IPO launch has gone well, with shares hitting $700 for the first time on 31 October 2007,^[38] due to strong sales and earnings in the advertising market, as well as the release of new features such as the desktop search function and its iGoogle personalized home page.^[39] The surge in stock price is fueled primarily by individual investors, as opposed to large institutional investors and mutual funds.^[39]

The company is listed on the NASDAQ stock exchange under the ticker symbol GOOG and under the London Stock Exchange under the ticker symbol GGEA.

Growth

While the primary business interest is in the web content arena, Google has begun experimenting with other markets, such as radio and print publications. On 17 January 2006, Google announced that its purchase of a radio advertising company “dMarc”, which provides an automated system that allows companies to advertise on the radio.^[40] This will allow Google to combine two niche advertising media—the Internet and radio—with Google’s ability to laser-focus on the tastes of consumers. Google has also begun an experiment in selling advertisements from its advertisers in offline newspapers and magazines, with select advertisements in the Chicago Sun-Times.^[41] They have been filling unsold space in the newspaper that would have normally been used for in-house advertisements.

Acquisitions

See also: List of Google acquisitions

Since 2001, Google has acquired several small start-up companies.

In 2004, Google acquired a company called Keyhole, Inc.,^[42] which developed a product called Earth Viewer which was renamed in 2005 to Google Earth^{[citation needed]}.

In February 2006, software company Adaptive Path sold Measure Map, a weblog statistics application, to Google. Registration to the service has since been temporarily disabled. The last update regarding the future of Measure Map was made on 6 April 2006 and outlined many of the known issues of the service.^[43]

In late 2006, Google bought the online video site YouTube for $1.65 billion in stock.^[44] Shortly after, on 31 October 2006, Google announced that it had also acquired JotSpot, a developer of wiki technology for collaborative Web sites.^[45]

On 13 April 2007, Google reached an agreement to acquire DoubleClick. Google agreed to buy the company for $3.1 billion.^[46]

On 2 July 2007, Google purchased GrandCentral. Google agreed to buy the company for $50 million.^[47]

On 9 July 2007, Google announced that it had signed a definitive agreement to acquire enterprise messaging security and compliance company Postini.^[48]

Partnerships

In 2005, Google entered into partnerships with other companies and government agencies to improve production and services. Google announced a partnership with NASA Ames Research Center to build up 1,000,000 square feet (93,000 m²) of offices and work on research projects involving large-scale data management, nanotechnology, distributed computing, and the entrepreneurial space industry.^[49] Google also entered into a partnership with Sun Microsystems in October to help share and distribute each other’s technologies.^[50] The company entered into a partnership with AOL of Time Warner,^[51] to enhance each other’s video search services.

The same year, the company became a major financial investor of the new .mobi top-level domain for mobile devices, in conjunction with several other companies, including Microsoft, Nokia, and Ericsson among others.^[52] In September 2007, Google launched, “Adsense for Mobile”, a service for its publishing partners which provides the ability to monetize their mobile websites through the targeted placement of mobile text ads,^[53] and acquired the mobile social networking site, Zingku.mobi, to “provide people worldwide with direct access to Google applications, and ultimately the information they want and need, right from their mobile devices.”^[54]

In 2006, Google and Fox Interactive Media of News Corp. entered into a $900 million agreement to provide search and advertising on the popular social networking site, MySpace.^[55]

Google has developed a partnership with GeoEye to launch a satellite providing Google with high-resolution (0.41 m monochrome, 1.65 m color) imagery for Google Earth. The satellite was launched from Vandenberg Air Force Base on 6 September 2008.^[56]

In 2008, Google announced that it was hosting an archive of Life magazine‘s photographs, as part of a joint effort. Some of the images in the archive were never published in the magazine.^[57] The photos are watermarked and originally had copyright notices posted on all photos, regardless of public domain status.^[58][59]

Products and services

Google appliance as shown at RSA Conference 2008

Main article: List of Google products

Google has created services and tools for the general public and business environment alike, including Web applications, advertising networks and solutions for businesses.

Advertising

99% of Google’s revenue is derived from its advertising programs.^[60] For the 2006 fiscal year, the company reported $10.492 billion in total advertising revenues and only $112 million in licensing and other revenues.^[61] Google is able to precisely track users’ interests across affiliated sites using DoubleClick technology^[62] and Google Analytics.^[63] Google’s advertisements carry a lower price tag when their human ad-rating team working around the world believes the ads improve the company’s user experience.^[64] Google AdWords allows Web advertisers to display advertisements in Google’s search results and the Google Content Network, through either a cost-per-click or cost-per-view scheme.^{[citation needed]} Google AdSense website owners can also display adverts on their own site, and earn money every time ads are clicked.^{[citation needed]} Google began in March 2009 to use behavioral targeting based on users’ interests.^[65]

Google has also been criticized by advertisers regarding its inability to combat click fraud, when a person or automated script is used to generate a charge on an advertisement without really having an interest in the product. Industry reports in 2006 claim that approximately 14 to 20 percent of clicks were in fact fraudulent or invalid.^[66]

In June 2008, Google reached an advertising agreement with Yahoo!, which would have allowed Yahoo! to feature Google advertisements on their web pages. The alliance between the two companies was never completely realized due to antitrust concerns by the U.S. Department of Justice. As a result, Google pulled out of the deal in November, 2008.^[67][68]

Software

The Google web search engine is the company’s most popular service. As of August 2007, Google is the most used search engine on the web with a 53.6% market share, ahead of Yahoo! (19.9%) and Live Search (12.9%).^[69] Google indexes billions of Web pages, so that users can search for the information they desire, through the use of keywords and operators, although at any given time it will only return a maximum of 1,000 results for any specific search query. Google has also employed the Web Search technology into other search services, including Image Search, Google News, the price comparison site Google Product Search, the interactive Usenet archive Google Groups, Google Maps, and more.

In early 2006, the company launched Google Video, which allowed users to both upload videos, and search and watch videos from the larger Internet.^[70] In 2009 uploads to Google video were discontinued.^[71]

Google has also developed several desktop applications, including Google Desktop, Picasa, SketchUp and Google Earth, an interactive mapping program powered by satellite and aerial imagery that covers the vast majority of the planet. Many major cities have such detailed images that one can zoom in close enough to see vehicles and pedestrians clearly. Consequently, there have been some concerns about national security implications; contention is that the software can be used to pinpoint with near-precision accuracy the physical location of critical infrastructure, commercial and residential buildings, bases, government agencies, and so on. However, the satellite images are not necessarily frequently updated, and all of them are available at no charge through other products and even government sources; the software simply makes accessing the information easier. A number of Indian state governments have raised concerns about the security risks posed by geographic details provided by Google Earth‘s satellite imaging.^[72]

Google has promoted their products in various ways. In London, Google Space was set-up in Heathrow Airport, showcasing several products, including Gmail, Google Earth and Picasa.^[73][74] Also, a similar page was launched for American college students, under the name College Life, Powered by Google.^[75]

In 2007, some reports surfaced that Google was planning the release of its own mobile phone, possibly a competitor to Apple‘s iPhone.^[76][77][78] The project, called Android, an operating system provides a standard development kit that will allow any “Android” phone to run software developed for the Android SDK, no matter the phone manufacturer. In September 2008, T-Mobile released the first phone running the Android platform, the G1.

Google Translate aka Google Language Tools is a server-side machine translation service, which can translate 35 different languages to each other, forming 595 language pairs. Browser extension tools (such as Firefox extensions) allow for easy access to Google Translate from the browser. The software uses corpus linguistics techniques from translated documents, (such as United Nations documents,^{[citation needed]} which are professionally translated) to extract translations accurate up to 88 percent. A “suggest a better translation” feature appears with the original language text in a pop-up text field, allowing users to indicate where the current translation is incorrect or else inferior to another translation.

On 1 September 2008, Google pre-announced the upcoming availability of Google Chrome, an open-source web browser,^[79] which was released on 2 September 2008.

On 7 July 2009, Google announced the project to develop Google Chrome OS, an open-source Linux-based operating system in a “window of opportunity”^[80][81].

Gmail

Main article: Gmail

Gmail is a free webmail, POP3 and IMAP service provided by Google. In the United Kingdom and Germany, it is officially called Google Mail.

Gmail was launched as an invitation-only beta release on April 1, 2004 and it became available to the general public on February 7, 2007. As of July 2009 it has 146 million users monthly. The service was upgraded from beta status on July 7, 2009, along with the rest of the Google Apps suite.

With an initial storage capacity offer of 1 GB per user, Gmail significantly increased the webmail standard for free storage from the 2 to 4MB its competitors offered at that time. The service currently offers over 7350 MB of free storage with additional storage ranging from 10 GB to 400 GB available for $20 to $500 (US) per year.

Gmail has a search-oriented interface and a “conversation view” similar to an Internet forum. Software developers know Gmail for its pioneering use of the Ajax programming technique.

Gmail runs on Google Servlet Engine and Google GFE/1.3 which run on Linux.

Enterprise Products

Google entered the Enterprise market in February, 2002 with the launch of its Google Search Appliance, targeted toward providing search technology to larger organizations.^[82] Providing search for a smaller document repository, Google launched the Mini in 2005.

Late in 2006, Google began to sell Custom Search Business Edition, providing customers with an advertising-free window into Google.com‘s index.^[83] In 2008, Google re-branded its next version of Custom Search Business Edition as Google Site Search.^[83]

In 2007, Google launched Google Apps Premier Edition, a version of Google Apps targeted primarily at the business user. It includes such extras as more disk space for e-mail, API access, and premium support, for a price of $50 per user per year. A large implementation of Google Apps with 38,000 users is at Lakehead University in Thunder Bay, Ontario, Canada.^[84]

Also in 2007, Google acquired Postini^[85] and continued to sell the acquired technology^[86] as Google Security Services.^[87]

Platform

Main article: Google platform

Google runs its services on several server farms, each comprising thousands of low-cost commodity computers running stripped-down versions of Linux. While the company divulges no details of its hardware, a 2006 estimate cites 450,000 servers, “racked up in clusters at data centers around the world.”^[88] The company has about 24 server farms around the world of various configurations. The farm in The Dalles, Oregon is powered by hydroelectricity at about 50 megawatts.^[89]

Corporate affairs and culture

Left to right, Eric E. Schmidt, Sergey Brin and Larry Page

Google is known for its informal corporate culture, of which its playful variations on its own corporate logo are an indicator. In 2007 and 2008, Fortune Magazine placed Google at the top of its list of the hundred best places to work.^[5] Google’s corporate philosophy embodies such casual principles as “you can make money without doing evil,” “you can be serious without a suit,” and “work should be challenging and the challenge should be fun.”^[90]

Google has been criticized for having salaries below industry standards.^[91] For example, some system administrators earn no more than $35,000 per year – considered to be quite low for the Bay Area job market.^[92] However, Google’s stock performance following its IPO has enabled many early employees to be competitively compensated by participation in the corporation’s remarkable equity growth.^[93]

After the company’s IPO in August 2004, it was reported that founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page, and CEO Eric Schmidt, requested that their base salary be cut to $1.^[94] Subsequent offers by the company to increase their salaries have been turned down, primarily because, “their primary compensation continues to come from returns on their ownership stakes in Google. As significant stockholders, their personal wealth is tied directly to sustained stock price appreciation and performance, which provides direct alignment with stockholder interests.”^[94] Prior to 2004, Schmidt was making $250,000 per year, and Page and Brin each earned a salary of $150,000.^{[dubious – discuss][94]}

They have all declined recent offers of bonuses and increases in compensation by Google’s board of directors. In a 2007 report of the United States’ richest people, Forbes reported that Sergey Brin and Larry Page were tied for #5 with a net worth of $18.5 billion each.^[95]

In 2007 and through early 2008, Google has seen the departure of several top executives. Gideon Yu, former chief financial officer of YouTube, a Google unit, joined Facebook^[96] along with Benjamin Ling, a high-ranking engineer, who left in October 2007.^[97] In March 2008, two senior Google leaders announced their desire to pursue other opportunities. Sheryl Sandburg, ex-VP of global online sales and operations began her position as COO of Facebook^[98] while Ash ElDifrawi, former head of brand advertising, left to become CMO of Netshops Inc.^[99]

Google’s persistent cookie and other information collection practices have led to concerns over user privacy. As of 11 December 2007, Google, like the Microsoft search engine, stores “personal information for 18 months” and by comparison, AOL (Time Warner) “retain[s] search requests for 13 months”^[100], and Yahoo! 90 days.^[101]

U.S. District Court Judge Louis Stanton, on July 1, 2008 ordered Google to give YouTube user data / log to Viacom to support its case in a billion-dollar copyright lawsuit against Google.^[102][103] Google and Viacom, however, on July 14, 2008, agreed in compromise to protect YouTube users’ personal data in the $1 billion (£ 497 million) copyright lawsuit. Google agreed it will make user information and Internet protocol addresses from its YouTube subsidiary anonymous before handing over the data to Viacom. The privacy deal also applied to other litigants including the FA Premier League, the Rodgers & Hammerstein Organisation and the Scottish Premier League.^[104][105] The deal however did not extend the anonymity to employees, since Viacom would prove that Google staff are aware of uploading of illegal material to the site. The parties therefore will further meet on the matter lest the data be made available to the court.^[106]

Googleplex

The Googleplex

Main article: Googleplex

Google’s headquarters in Mountain View, California, is referred to as “the Googleplex” in a play of words; a googolplex being 10¹⁰¹⁰⁰, or a one followed by a googol of zeros, and the HQ being a complex of buildings (cf. multiplex, cineplex, etc). The lobby is decorated with a piano, lava lamps, old server clusters, and a projection of search queries on the wall. The hallways are full of exercise balls and bicycles. Each employee has access to the corporate recreation center. Recreational amenities are scattered throughout the campus and include a workout room with weights and rowing machines, locker rooms, washers and dryers, a massage room, assorted video games, foosball, a baby grand piano, a pool table, and ping pong. In addition to the rec room, there are snack rooms stocked with various foods and drinks.^[107]

Sign at the Googleplex

In 2006, Google moved into 311,000 square feet (28,900 m²) of office space in New York City, at 111 Eighth Ave. in Manhattan.^[108] The office was specially designed and built for Google and houses its largest advertising sales team, which has been instrumental in securing large partnerships, most recently deals with MySpace and AOL.^[108] In 2003, they added an engineering staff in New York City, which has been responsible for more than 100 engineering projects, including Google Maps, Google Spreadsheets, and others.^[108] It is estimated that the building costs Google $10 million per year to rent and is similar in design and functionality to its Mountain View headquarters, including foosball, air hockey, and ping-pong tables, as well as a video game area.^[108] In November 2006, Google opened offices on Carnegie Mellon‘s campus in Pittsburgh.^[109] By late 2006, Google also established a new headquarters for its AdWords division in Ann Arbor, Michigan.^[110]

Google is taking steps to ensure that their operations are environmentally sound. In October 2006, the company announced plans to install thousands of solar panels to provide up to 1.6 megawatts of electricity, enough to satisfy approximately 30% of the campus’ energy needs.^[111] The system will be the largest solar power system constructed on a U.S. corporate campus and one of the largest on any corporate site in the world.^[111] Google has faced accusations in Harper’s Magazine^[112] of being extremely excessive with their energy usage, and were accused of employing their “Don’t be evil” motto as well as their very public energy saving campaigns as means of trying to cover up or make up for the massive amounts of energy their servers actually require.

In 2009 Google announced it was deploying herds of goats to keep grassland around the Googleplex short, helping to prevent the threat from seasonal bush fires while also reducing the carbon footprint of mowing the extensive grounds.^[113][114]

Innovation Time Off

As a motivation technique (usually called Innovation Time Off), all Google engineers are encouraged to spend 20% of their work time (one day per week) on projects that interest them. Some of Google’s newer services, such as Gmail, Google News, Orkut, and AdSense originated from these independent endeavors.^[115] In a talk at Stanford University, Marissa Mayer, Google’s Vice President of Search Products and User Experience, stated that her analysis showed that 50% of the new product launches originated from the 20% time.^[116]

Easter eggs and April Fool’s Day jokes

Main article: Google’s hoaxes

Google has a tradition of creating April Fool’s Day jokes—such as Google MentalPlex, which allegedly featured the use of mental power to search the web.^[117] In 2002, they claimed that pigeons were the secret behind their growing search engine.^[118] In 2004, they featured Google Lunar (which claimed to feature jobs on the moon),^[119] and in 2005, a fictitious brain-boosting drink, termed Google Gulp was announced.^[120] In 2006, they came up with Google Romance, a hypothetical online dating service.^[121] In 2007, Google announced two joke products. The first was a free wireless Internet service called TiSP (Toilet Internet Service Provider)^[122] in which one obtained a connection by flushing one end of a fiber-optic cable down their toilet and waiting only an hour for a “Plumbing Hardware Dispatcher (PHD)” to connect it to the Internet.^[122] Additionally, Google’s Gmail page displayed an announcement for Gmail Paper, which allows users of their free email service to have email messages printed and shipped to a snail mail address.^[123]

Google’s services contain a number of Easter eggs; for instance, the Language Tools page offers the search interface in the Swedish Chef‘s “Bork bork bork,” Pig Latin, “Hacker” (actually leetspeak), Elmer Fudd, and Klingon.^[124] In addition, the search engine calculator provides the Answer to Life, the Universe, and Everything from Douglas Adams‘ The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.^[125] As Google’s search box can be used as a unit converter (as well as a calculator), some non-standard units are built in, such as the Smoot. Google also routinely modifies its logo in accordance with various holidays or special events throughout the year, such as Christmas, Mother’s Day, or the birthdays of various notable individuals.^[126]

IPO and culture

Many people speculated that Google’s IPO would inevitably lead to changes in the company’s culture,^[127] because of shareholder pressure for employee benefit reductions and short-term advances, or because a large number of the company’s employees would suddenly become millionaires on paper. In a report given to potential investors, co-founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page promised that the IPO would not change the company’s culture.^[128] Later Mr. Page said, “We think a lot about how to maintain our culture and the fun elements. We spent a lot of time getting our offices right. We think it’s important to have a high density of people. People are packed together everywhere. We all share offices. We like this set of buildings because it’s more like a densely packed university campus than a typical suburban office park.”^[129] Google has faced allegations of sexism and ageism from former employees.^[130][131]

However, many analysts^[who?] are finding that as Google grows, the company is becoming more “corporate”. In 2005, articles in The New York Times and other sources began suggesting that Google had lost its anti-corporate, no evil philosophy.^{[132][133][134]} In an effort to maintain the company’s unique culture, Google has designated a Chief Culture Officer in 2006, who also serves as the Director of Human Resources. The purpose of the Chief Culture Officer is to develop and maintain the culture and work on ways to keep true to the core values that the company was founded on in the beginning—a flat organization with a collaborative environment.^[135]

Philanthropy

Main article: Google.org

In 2004, Google formed a for-profit philanthropic wing, Google.org, with a start-up fund of $1 billion.^[136] The express mission of the organization is to create awareness about climate change, global public health, and global poverty. One of its first projects is to develop a viable plug-in hybrid electric vehicle that can attain 100 mpg. The founder is Dr Larry Brilliant^[137] and the current director is Megan Smith.^[138]

In 2008 Google announced its “project 10^100″ which accepted ideas for how to help the community and then will allow google users to vote on their favorites.^[139]

Network Neutrality

Google is a noted supporter of network neutrality. According to Google’s Guide to Net Neutrality:

“Network neutrality is the principle that Internet users should be in control of what content they view and what applications they use on the Internet. The Internet has operated according to this neutrality principle since its earliest days… Fundamentally, net neutrality is about equal access to the Internet. In our view, the broadband carriers should not be permitted to use their market power to discriminate against competing applications or content. Just as telephone companies are not permitted to tell consumers who they can call or what they can say, broadband carriers should not be allowed to use their market power to control activity online.” ^[140]

On February 7, 2006, Vinton Cerf, a co-inventor of the Internet Protocol (IP), and current Vice President and “Chief Internet Evangelist” at Google, in testimony before Congress, said, “allowing broadband carriers to control what people see and do online would fundamentally undermine the principles that have made the Internet such a success

General

• Ask.com (formerly Ask Jeeves)
• Baidu (Chinese)
• Bing (formerly MSN Search and Live Search)
• Cuil
• Duck Duck Go
• Google
• Sogou (Chinese)
• Sohu (Chinese)
• Yahoo! Search
• Yandex (Russian)

Geographical limited scope

• Accoona, China/US
• Alleba, Philippines
• Ansearch, Australia/US/UK/NZ
• Araby, Middle East
• Baidu, China
• Daum, Korea
• Guruji.com, India
• Goo, Japan
• Leit.is, Iceland
• Miner.hu, Hungary
• Najdi.si, Slovenia
• Naver, Korea
• Onkosh, Middle East
• Rambler, Russia
• Rediff, India
• SAPO, Portugal/Angola/Cabo Verde/Mozambique
• Search.ch, Switzerland
• Sesam, Norway, Sweden
• Seznam, Czech Republic
• Walla!, Israel
• Yandex, Russia
• ZipLocal, Canada/US

Accountancy

• IFACnet

Business

• Business.com
• GlobalSpec
• Nexis (Lexis Nexis)
• Thomasnet (United States)

Enterprise

See also: Enterprise search

• AskMeNow: S3 – Semantic Search Solution
• Concept Searching Limited: concept search products
• Dieselpoint: Search & Navigation
• dtSearch: dtSearch Engine(SDK), dtSearch Web
• Endeca: Information Access Platform
• Exalead: exalead one:enterprise
• Expert System S.p.A.: Cogito
• Fast Search & Transfer: Enterprise Search Platform (ESP), RetrievalWare (formerly Convera)
• Funnelback: Funnelback Search
• ISYS Search Software: ISYS:web, ISYS:sdk
• Microsoft: SharePoint Search Services
• Northern Light
• Open Text: Hummingbird Search Server, Livelink Search
• Oracle Corporation: Secure Enterprise Search 10g
• SAP: TREX
• TeraText: TeraText Suite
• Vivisimo: Vivisimo Clustering Engine
• X1 Technologies : X1 Enterprise Search
• ZyLAB Technologies: ZyIMAGE Information Access Platform

Mobile/Handheld

• Taptu: taptu mobile/social search

Job

Main articles: Job search engine and Employment website

See also: Category:Job search engines

• Bixee.com (India)
• CareerBuilder.com (USA)
• Craigslist (by city)
• Dice.com (Technology Professionals)
• Eluta.ca (Canada)
• Hotjobs.com (USA)
• Incruit (Korea)
• Indeed.com (USA)
• LinkUp.com (USA)
• Monster.com (USA),(India)
• Recruit.net (International)
• SimplyHired.com (USA)
• Naukri.com (India)

Legal

• WestLaw
• Lexis (Lexis Nexis)
• Quicklaw
• Manupatra

Medical

• Bioinformatic Harvester
• Entrez (includes Pubmed)
• EB-eye EBI’s Search Engine EMBL-EBI’s Search engine
• GenieKnows
• GoPubMed (knowledge-based: GO – GeneOntology and MeSH – Medical Subject Headings)
• Healia
• Searchmedica
• WebMD
• PubGene
• Nextbio (Life Science Search Engine)
• VADLO (Life Sciences Search Engine)

News

• Google News
• Daylife
• MagPortal
• Newslookup
• Nexis (Lexis Nexis)
• Topix.net
• Yahoo! News

People

• PeekYou
• Ex.plode.us
• InfoSpace
• Spock
• Spokeo
• Wink
• Zabasearch.com
• ZoomInfo

Real property

• Fizber.com
• Home.co.uk
• HotPads.com
• Rightmove
• Zillow.com

Video Games

• GenieKnows
• Wazap (Japan)

By information type

Search engines dedicated to a specific kind of information

Forum

• Omgili

Blog

• Amatomu
• Bloglines
• BlogScope
• IceRocket
• Sphere
• Technorati

Multimedia

See also: Multimedia search

• Bing Videos
• blinkx
• FindSounds
• Google Video
• Munax‘s PlayAudioVideo
• Picsearch
• Pixsta
• Podscope
• Songza
• SeeqPod
• Veveo
• TinEye
• Yahoo! Video
• YouTube

Source code

• Google Code Search
• JExamples
• Koders
• Krugle

BitTorrent

These search engines work across the BitTorrent protocol.

• Btjunkie
• Demonoid
• FlixFlux
• Isohunt
• Mininova
• The Pirate Bay
• TorrentSpy

Email

• TEK

Maps

• Bing Maps
• Géoportail
• Google Maps
• MapQuest
• Yahoo! Maps

Price

• Google Product Search (formerly Froogle)
• Kelkoo
• MSN Shopping
• MySimon
• PriceGrabber
• PriceRunner
• Shopping.com
• ShopWiki
• Shopzilla (also operates Bizrate)
• TheFind.com

Question and answer

Human answers

• Answers.com
• eHow
• Uclue
• Yahoo! Answers
• Stack Overflow
• DeeperWeb

Automatic answers

See also: Question answering

• AskMeNow
• BrainBoost
• True Knowledge
• Wolfram Alpha

Natural language

See also: Natural language search engine and Semantic search

• Ask.com
• Bing (Semantic ability is powered by Powerset)
• BrainBoost
• hakia
• Lexxe
• Powerset

By model

Open source search engines

• DataparkSearch
• Egothor
• Gonzui
• Grub
• Ht://dig
• Isearch
• Lucene
• Lemur Toolkit & Indri Search Engine
• mnoGoSearch
• Namazu
• Nutch
• OpenFTS
• Sciencenet (for scientific knowledge, based on YaCy technology)
• Sphinx
• SWISH-E
• Terrier Search Engine
• Wikia Search
• Xapian
• YaCy
• Zettair

Semantic browsing engines

• Evri
• Hakia

Social search engines

See also: Social search, Relevance feedback, and Human search engine

• ChaCha Search
• Delver
• EarthFrisk.org
• Eurekster
• Mahalo.com
• OneRiot
• Rollyo
• Sproose
• Trexy
• Wikia search
• Wink provides web search by analyzing user contributions such as bookmarks and feedback

Metasearch engines

See also: Metasearch engine

• Brainboost
• ChunkIt!
• Clusty
• Dogpile
• Excite
• Harvester42
• HotBot
• Info.com
• Ixquick
• Kayak
• LeapFish
• Mamma
• Metacrawler
• MetaLib
• Mobissimo
• Myriad Search
• SideStep
• Turbo10
• WebCrawler
• DeeperWeb

Visual search engines

• ChunkIt!
• Grokker
• Kartoo
• Pixsta
• PubGene
• Viewzi

Search Appliances

• Google: Google Search Appliance

Desktop search engines

See also: Desktop search

Usenet

• Google Groups (formerly Deja News)

Based on

Google

• AOL Search
• CompuServe Search
• MySpace Search
• Netscape
• Ripple

Yahoo!

• AltaVista
• AlltheWeb
• Ecocho
• Forestle (an ecologically motivated site supporting sustainable rain forests)
• GoodSearch
• Rectifi

Bing

• A9.com
• Alexa Internet
• Tafiti
• Ms. Dewey

Ask.com

• Hakia (semantic search)
• iWon
• Lycos

Acquired or defunct search engines

• BRS/Search (now OpenText Livelink ECM Discovery Server)
• Direct Hit Technologies (acquired by Ask Jeeves in January, 2000)
• Google Answers
• Infoseek
• Inktomi
• Lotus Magellan
• Overture.com (formerly GoTo.com, now Yahoo! Search Marketing)
• PubSub
• Singingfish
• Teoma
• Wikia Search
• WiseNut
• World Wide Web Worm

A search engine operates, in the following order

1. Web crawling
2. Indexing
3. Searching

Web search engines work by storing information about many web pages, which they retrieve from the WWW itself. These pages are retrieved by a Web crawler (sometimes also known as a spider) — an automated Web browser which follows every link it sees. Exclusions can be made by the use of robots.txt. The contents of each page are then analyzed to determine how it should be indexed (for example, words are extracted from the titles, headings, or special fields called meta tags). Data about web pages are stored in an index database for use in later queries. Some search engines, such as Google, store all or part of the source page (referred to as a cache) as well as information about the web pages, whereas others, such as AltaVista, store every word of every page they find. This cached page always holds the actual search text since it is the one that was actually indexed, so it can be very useful when the content of the current page has been updated and the search terms are no longer in it. This problem might be considered to be a mild form of linkrot, and Google’s handling of it increases usability by satisfying user expectations that the search terms will be on the returned webpage. This satisfies the principle of least astonishment since the user normally expects the search terms to be on the returned pages. Increased search relevance makes these cached pages very useful, even beyond the fact that they may contain data that may no longer be available elsewhere.

When a user enters a query into a search engine (typically by using key words), the engine examines its index and provides a listing of best-matching web pages according to its criteria, usually with a short summary containing the document’s title and sometimes parts of the text. Most search engines support the use of the boolean operators AND, OR and NOT to further specify the search query. Some search engines provide an advanced feature called proximity search which allows users to define the distance between keywords.

The usefulness of a search engine depends on the relevance of the result set it gives back. While there may be millions of webpages that include a particular word or phrase, some pages may be more relevant, popular, or authoritative than others. Most search engines employ methods to rank the results to provide the “best” results first. How a search engine decides which pages are the best matches, and what order the results should be shown in, varies widely from one engine to another. The methods also change over time as Internet usage changes and new techniques evolve.

Most Web search engines are commercial ventures supported by advertising revenue and, as a result, some employ the practice of allowing advertisers to pay money to have their listings ranked higher in search results. Those search engines which do not accept money for their search engine results make money by running search related ads alongside the regular search engine results. The search engines make money every time someone clicks on one of these ads.

The very first tool used for searching on the (pre-web) Internet was Archie.[3] The name stands for “archive” without the “v.” It was created in 1990 by Alan Emtage, a student at McGill University in Montreal. The program downloaded the directory listings of all the files located on public anonymous FTP (File Transfer Protocol) sites, creating a searchable database of file names; however, Archie did not index the contents of these sites.

The rise of Gopher (created in 1991 by Mark McCahill at the University of Minnesota) led to two new search programs, Veronica and Jughead. Like Archie, they searched the file names and titles stored in Gopher index systems. Veronica (Very Easy Rodent-Oriented Net-wide Index to Computerized Archives) provided a keyword search of most Gopher menu titles in the entire Gopher listings. Jughead (Jonzy’s Universal Gopher Hierarchy Excavation And Display) was a tool for obtaining menu information from specific Gopher servers. While the name of the search engine “Archie” was not a reference to the Archie comic book series, “Veronica” and “Jughead” are characters in the series, thus referencing their predecessor.

In June 1993, Matthew Gray, then at MIT, produced what was probably the first web robot, the Perl-based World Wide Web Wanderer, and used it to generate an index called ‘Wandex’. The purpose of the Wanderer was to measure the size of the World Wide Web, which it did until late 1995. The web’s first search engine Aliweb appeared in November 1993. Aliweb did not use a web robot, but instead depended on being notified by website administrators of the existence at each site of an index file in a particular format.

JumpStation (released in December 1993[4]) used a web robot to find web pages and to build its index, and used a web form as the interface to its query program. It was thus the first WWW resource-discovery tool to combine the three essential features of a web search engine (crawling, indexing, and searching) as described below. Because of the limited resources available on the platform on which it ran, its indexing and hence searching were limited to the titles and headings found in the web pages the crawler encountered.

One of the first “full text” crawler-based search engines was WebCrawle