What Is Yahoo?

Yahoo is far from just a news site and search engine. Here's everything you can do on this website

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Yahoo is a web services provider. Founded in 1994, it's one of the oldest names on the internet and consistently one of the 10 most popular websites.

At first glance, you might assume Yahoo is just a portal for news. While you can absolutely get news here, there's actually a lot more to the site, as we'll see below.

Picture of the Yahoo website logo

Yahoo

Yahoo is a backronym for "Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle." You can learn more about what Yahoo stands for here.

Yahoo's List of Services

The best way to access all of Yahoo's web services in one place is via their Yahoo Everything page. Here are a few examples of what you can do:

  • Yahoo Downloads: Extensions you can install to your browser to do things like access news on Yahoo each time you open your browser, view more of your inbox, make Yahoo your default search engine, and more.
  • Yahoo Entertainment: Movie show times, videos, and news specific to TV, movies, celebrities, and music.
  • Yahoo Fantasy Sports: Sports news, scores, rumors, fantasy games, and more.
  • Yahoo Finance: Stock market information, quotes, finance news, and more.
  • Yahoo Mail: A email service where you can send and receive email messages.
  • My Yahoo: Customize Yahoo to make it your own personalize start page with local weather, email snippets, a daily horoscope, and more.
  • Yahoo News: The latest news from around the world and in the United States.
  • Yahoo Search: A web search engine where you can find websites, videos, images, recipes, and more. The "Trending Now" section lets you see the most popular searches right now.
  • Yahoo Shopping: Browse stores, brands, or categories like electronics, toys, sporting goods, flowers, gifts, clothing, and more.
  • Yahoo Weather: View the current weather and forecast where you are and around the world.

Some discontinued Yahoo services include Yahoo Messenger, Yahoo Answers, Yahoo People Search, Yahoo Groups, and Yahoo 360.

Open Yahoo World to view international links. It's there that you can visit the site in various languages like German, French, Spanish, Italian, and English.

Some discontinued Yahoo services include Yahoo Messenger, Yahoo Answers, Yahoo People Search, Yahoo Groups, and Yahoo 360.

Some Yahoo brands you've probably heard of but might not know are owned by this company, include TechCrunch, AOL, Engadget, Flurry, and Autoblog.

Yahoo Search Tips

The web search engine, accessible from search.yahoo.com, is one of its most popular tools. The home page is extremely simple, but there are some things to note after starting a search.

For example, it might not seem obvious at first how to use Yahoo to find images or videos. One way to do it is to first start a search. After seeing the results, you can switch over to News, Images, or Videos for those results. The More menu has some extra options.

Yahoo Search more options

Websites Like Yahoo

Yahoo isn't the only website of its kind. Google is extremely similar because it also offers a variety of free services that spawn from the same company, like Google Search, Gmail, Google News, a finance search tool, built-in shopping results, etc.

Yandex follows these same lines. There's an email account you can get, a way to find directions on a map, a file storage service, and a search engine for finding images, web pages, and videos.

There are also other web search engines, like DuckDuckGo, Bing, and Startpage. Yahoo Mail is also just one of many free email providers.

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