Yahoo!



Started at Stanford University, Yahoo! is one of the Internet's largest and most popular portal sites. Originally a searchable directory of Web sites, Yahoo! has expanded to offer world news, free Web-based email, discussion groups, online games, and other services. It once owned GeoCities, a provider of free Web sites.

It is currently (2019) owned by Verizon.


 * Fun with Acronyms: The name originally stood for "Yet Another Highly Organized Oracle". (Or, depending on who you ask, "Yet Another Hierarchically-Organized Oracle".)
 * Loophole Abuse: On Yahoo! Answers, you stand a good chance of gaining points quickly by voting for your own answer as the best. You get 2 points for the answer, 1 point for the vote, and 10 points when your answer is selected the best, making a total of 13 points for doing almost nothing. Of course, that doesn't work if the asker selects a best answer, or if some other answer gets more votes.
 * Obvious Beta: Yahoo! Mail (the version codenamed "Minty"), with several users still experiencing hiccups compared to smoother functionality with Yahoo! Mail Classic, which is now virtually inaccessible save for an obscure method which can forcibly revert the user's email to Classic.
 * The search engine remains mostly useless through years: it "corrects" queries (i.e. any search term not in the dictionary of a 10-year old SMS-kid is turned into "twilight windows mortgage xbox") and it's unable to search multiple terms (it always does "OR"-search, which is useless, because the whole point is to narrow down to what you need - including more noise does the exact opposite, and gives auto-correction a chance to drown everything in widespread and completely irrelevant "finds"). About the only reasonably reliable uses of it are searches for trademarks, ads or widespread quotes.
 * We All Live in America: Yahoo! Answers. Not only the users, but often the forum itself indulges in quite a bit of it.