Yahoo!
started out as "Jerry's Guide to
the World Wide Web", a web site featuring a directory of other
sites, organized in a hierarchy (rather than a searchable index of
pages).
It was renamed "Yahoo!" shortly
thereafter. "Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle" is a
backronym for this name, but Filo and Yang insist they selected
the name because they liked the word's general definition, as in
Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift: "rude, unsophisticated,
uncouth."
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Yahoo! has also been criticised for
funding spyware and adware - advertising from Yahoo!'s clients often
appears on-screen in pop-ups generated from adware that a user may have
installed on their computer without realising it by accepting online
offers to download software to fix computer clocks or improve computer
security, add browser enhancements, etc.
Similarly, Yahoo! have received
adverse comment for bundling their Yahoo! toolbar with other software
(Macromedia Flash 8 is an example) with installation being the default
setting. The toolbar itself has been noted as taking up a lot of
screen-space when installed. Also Windows users will find themselves
unable to uninstall the toolbar by normal means on Internet Explorer. It
can be uninstalled normally on Firefox.
As Yahoo!'s popularity has increased, so has the range of
features it offers, making it a kind of one-stop shop for all the
popular activities of the Internet. These now include: Yahoo! Mail,
a Web-based e-mail service, Yahoo! Messenger, an instant
messaging client, a very popular mailing list service (Yahoo! Groups),
online gaming and chat, various news and information portals, online
shopping and online auction facilities.
Many of these are based at least in
part on previously independent services, which Yahoo! has acquired -
such as the popular GeoCities free Web-hosting service, Rocketmail, and
various competing mailing list providers such as eGroups. Many of these
take-overs were controversial and unpopular with users of the existing
services, as Yahoo! often changed the relevant terms of service. An
example of this is their claiming intellectual property rights for the
content on their servers, which the original companies had not done.
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