What Is Yahoo?

Yahoo is a web services provider. Launched in 1995, it's one of the oldest names on the internet and consistently one of the most popular websites. Yahoo offers services such as a web search engine and an email service.

At first glance, after visiting the site's home page, you might assume that it's just a portal for news. While you can absolutely get news from Yahoo, there's actually a lot more to the site, as we'll see below.

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 free 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: Shop through Yahoo by browsing 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 of Yahoo's other services include Yahoo Developer Network and Yahoo Lifestyle. Yahoo used to offer other services that are now discontinued, such as 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, Engadget, Flurry, and Autoblog.

Yahoo Search Tips

The web search engine is one of its most popular tools. Accessible from search.yahoo.com, 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 web search. After seeing the results, you can switch over to Images or Videos for those results. The More menu has some extra options.

When you run a search from the Yahoo Search home page and then access a different part of the tool (such as News, Local, etc.), you might be redirected to a different search engine for that purpose, such as video.search.yahoo.com.

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