Development of search technology Yahoo Search began as a tool to search
Yahoo! Directory, which was launched in 1994 by
Jerry Yang and
David Filo, then students at
Stanford University. It became the first popular search engine on the Web, despite being manually curated, unlike its competitors. In 2000, Yahoo Search began licensing results from
Google Search. Seeking to provide its own search engine results, in December 2002 Yahoo announced it would acquire search engine company
Inktomi. The acquisition completed in March 2003. In October 2003, Yahoo purchased
Overture Services, Inc., which included the
AlltheWeb and
AltaVista search engines. The next month, the site began practicing
paid inclusion to guarantee listing in search; however, most results continued to come from free web crawling. In 2005, Yahoo Search results began including links to previous versions of pages archived on the
Wayback Machine.
Evolution of search features Yahoo released Panama, its updated sponsored search platform, in 2007. The platform introduced ad matching based on a mix of bid prices, ad quality, and relevance to the user. Also in 2007, Yahoo released OneSearch, its Internet search system for mobile phones. Yahoo used
Novarra's mobile content transcoding service for OneSearch. In October 2007, Yahoo Search added Search Assist, which provided real-time query suggestions and related concepts as queries were typed. The site also added search for audio, video, and photos. Yahoo began piloting Search Shortcuts, which highlighted key information like ratings and reviews and official sites in search results. Yahoo Shortcuts, a separate tool, launched in December 2007 as a plugin to add contextual links and freely licensed
Flickr photos to content on
WordPress sites quickly. In May 2008, Yahoo introduced SearchScan, a feature to alert search users of
viruses,
spyware and
spam websites, with support from
McAfee SiteAdvisor technology. That same month, Yahoo piloted a new search interface called Yahoo Glue, displaying different kinds of search results (e.g., photos and videos, in addition to hyperlinks) together on the same page. Yahoo Glue expanded to the US that November. In July 2008, Yahoo Search introduced
Yahoo Search BOSS ("Build your Own Search Service"). This service allows developers to use Yahoo's system for indexing information and images and create custom search engines. Yahoo introduced Search Direct, which suggests results as the user types, in March 2011. The function aims to answer user questions without loading a new page. In 2012, the company released
Yahoo Axis, a iOS app and desktop
browser extension to provide a streamlined search experience. Axis displayed search results as visual snapshots in a horizontal carousel, allowing users to preview pages without leaving the results page. It was sunset in June 2013. Yahoo published Aviate, its search application for
Android devices, in June 2014. The app was updated with browser-less search six months later.
Partnerships In July 2009, Yahoo and Microsoft announced a deal in which
Bing would provide results for Yahoo Search. In exchange, the deal also established a "search alliance" between Yahoo and Bing to sell advertising on both services, with Yahoo receiving 88% of search ad sales revenue on its site for the first five years, as well as the right to sell advertisements on certain Microsoft sites. In March 2014, Yahoo partnered with
Yelp to integrate its reviews and user-contributed photos into Yahoo Search. In November 2014, Mozilla signed a five-year partnership with Yahoo, making Yahoo Search the default search engine for
Firefox browsers in the US. Yahoo and Microsoft modified their partnership in April 2015 to require Bing results only on the "majority" of desktop traffic, allowing Yahoo to enter into non-exclusive deals for search on mobile platforms and the remainder of desktop traffic. In January 2020, Yahoo's parent Verizon launched OneSearch, a privacy-focused
search engine. OneSearch uses Bing search results. The service selects ads based on keywords rather than
HTTP cookies. OneSearch is no longer supported by Yahoo. == See also ==