Yahoo! is an American provider of online services headquartered and owned by Verizon Media in Sunnyvale, California. In January 1994, Jerry Yang and David Filo formed the original Yahoo! corporation and it was incorporated on March 2, 1995. In the 1990s, Yahoo was one of the founders of the early Internet age.
A web portal, Yahoo! search engine and related resources are accessible or offered, including Yahoo! Directory, Yahoo! Mail, Yahoo! News, Yahoo! Finance, Yahoo! Groups, Yahoo! Answers, advertising, online mapping, video sharing, fantasy sports, and its platform for social media.
It was one of the most common sites in the United States at its peak. Yahoo was the most widely read news and media website, with over 7 billion views each month, ranked as the sixth most visited website worldwide in 2016, according to third-party web analytics companies Alexa and SimilarWeb.
Yahoo, once one of the biggest Internet businesses, declined steadily beginning in the late 2000s, and Verizon Communications purchased much of Yahoo's Internet sector for $4.48 billion in 2017, except its interests in Alibaba Group and Yahoo! Japan, which were sold to Altaba, Yahoo's successor corporation.
Despite its fall from popularity, according to the Alexa rankings as of October 2019, Yahoo domain websites are still among the most popular, ranking 10th in the world.