Happy birthday, Yahoo! (or is it?)
In 1995, Yahoo! was incorporated.
I was very close to using our March 1 edition of This day in search history to wish Yahoo a happy 28th birthday. Especially after I saw our 2010 story, Happy Birthday, Yahoo: 15 Years Old Today.
But why was that the only headline from March 1 on Search Engine Land about it being Yahoo’s birthday? Perhaps it was because our article discussed a Yahoo blog post (Happy 15th Birthday Yahoo! from Jerry and David!), which was posted on March 1 and contained the words “as we celebrate 15 years today.”
Digging deeper into our archives, things continued to be confusing:
Yahoo Celebrates Its 13th Birthday; Will There Be A 14th? – published March 5, 2008 (references a photo shared by Yahoo via Flicker on March 4, which was completely unhelpful.)
Yahoo Celebrates Its 14th Birthday – published March 2, 2009. (“Yahoo is celebrating its 14th birthday today…”)
Yahoo Turns 16 Years Old – published March 2, 2011 (“On March 1st, Yahoo turned 16 years old.” And that’s because Yahoo marked its “Sweet 16” on March 1, 2011.)
Yahoo Celebrates Its 20th Birthday By Setting New World Record For Yodeling, published March 3, 2015 (“Yahoo turned 20 yesterday…” i.e., March 2)
Well, on March 2, 2005, Yahoo celebrated its 10th birthday by giving away a free scoop of Baskin-Robbins ice cream. And on March 2, 2020, Yahoo wished itself a happy birthday on social media and shared 25 years of milestones.
I even went to Yahoo search for the first time in a very long time to find out what Yahoo search (powered by Microsoft Bing) would tell me. No surprise, Wikipedia provided further consensus about March 2:
So Yahoo’s “official” birthday seems to be March 2, not March 1. Although it could easily be argued that neither is actually the “real” birthday of Yahoo.
After all, the company was founded in 1994. Jerry and David’s Guide to the World Wide Web was renamed as Yahoo in April 1994. And the Yahoo.com domain was registered on Jan. 18, 1995.
Also, let’s not add to the confusion by even mentioning the birthday of Yahoo Search (Feb. 18, 2004).
Ultimately, it really doesn’t matter whether Yahoo’s “real birthday” is. We already went through this with Google (see: Google Is 10 Years Old? Finding The Real Google Birthday), which decided to officially celebrate its birthday every Sept. 27.
So we wish Yahoo a happy birthday today. On March 2. As it should be.
And it seems like Yahoo’s search team will be wishing for a search comeback this year.
Also on this day
Google may require double verification for some business profiles
2022: Google updated its help documents to say that it may require you to verify your business with an additional method.
Semrush buys Kompyte so it can upsell competitive intelligence tools
2022: Kompyte offered competitive analysis tools that help marketers track changes on a competitor’s site, ad copy, social media and more.
New content analytics coming soon to LinkedIn
2022: LinkedIn would soon give creators more details on the people who read and engage with their content.
Semrush plans to go public after posting big 2020 growth
2021: The company’s gross profit was just under $95 million in 2020, compared to just under $70 million in 2019.
Maryland’s ad tax is here, and advertisers should look to their European counterparts for how to deal with it
2021: Ads from companies (in this case, platforms like Google, Microsoft, Amazon and Facebook) will be taxed at a rate of 2.5% to 10%, depending on their annual global revenue.
Google tightens FAQ markup guidelines, disallows repetition of questions and answers
2020: Repeating the same question and answer in multiple FAQ pages on your site would put you in violation of Google’s guidelines.
Video: Aleyda Solis on remote SEO work, international SEO and YouTube optimization
2020: The international SEO expert shared advice on managing her SEO clients while traveling to help educate the SEO industry.
Bing Entity Search API is now available
2018: The API let you pull Bing Knowledge Graph information about people, places, things, and local businesses directly into sites and apps.
Yelp offers new ad customization to advertisers
2018: Advertisers could pick an image and favorite review or let an algorithm do it for them.
Search in Pics: Google Dublin snow, dog racing & Noogler handbook
2018: The latest images showing what people eat at the search engine companies, how they play, who they meet, where they speak, what toys they have and more.
Google makes it easier to search for programming languages answers
2017: Google could now handle queries containing sequences of 2–3 special characters.
AdWords Expanded Text Ads could get even longer with second description line test
2017: A new test doubled the number of characters available in text ad descriptions.
Google Would Like You To Buy Products Using Voice Search
2016: Conversational search would allow users to buy or locate products by just talking to their devices.
Google City Searches Now Include Hotel Booking Info In Knowledge Graph
2015: Average star rating and costs for city hotels were listed, along with “View hotels” link that delivered results page for hotels in the relevant city.
Yahoo’s Search Share Drops For First Time Since Firefox Deal Began
2015: Yahoo couldn’t maintain gains from previous months and small “switchback” losses to Google were likely to erode share more in the coming months.
Microsoft Advertising Begins Aggressively Courting Small Businesses For Search
2012: Microsoft Advertising was reaching out to PPC experts and small business customers, hoping to pair them up to educate SMBs about adCenter and learn about their needs and challenges.
iPad-apalooza: Yandex Looks At iPad Search & 30 Percent Of North Americans Want iPad3
2012: iPad users accounted for about 1% of all internet users in Russia.
Nathon Fillion Demonstrates His “Google Maps Pose”
2012: “If a Google Maps car is coming down the street, what am I going to do?”
Search In Pics: Google Sheep, Bing Neon Sign & Google Pinata
2012: The latest images showing what people eat at the search engine companies, how they play, who they meet, where they speak, what toys they have, and more.
Google Trying To Minimize Collateral Damage From “Farmer” Update
2011: Related:
Google: We’ve Made No “Significant” Changes To The Farmer Update
More Farmer Update Winners, Losers: Wikihow, Blippr & Yahoo Answers
Twitter Putting Focus On SMBs For Ads Growth
2011: About 100 small advertisers were using Twitter’s “promoted” ad products. By contrast, 125 big brands were using the site to market their products or services.
February 2011: Search Engine Land’s Most Popular Stories
2011: Search Engine Land’s 10 most popular stories from February 2011.
Google Extends “Click To Call” Ads To All Advertisers
2010: With no need for a physical address, calls could now be directed to call centers and more easily utilized by “national” advertisers.
Has Google Just Patented Geo-Targeting?
2010: Google was awarded a patent (“Determining and/or using location information in an ad system”) that had broad implications for PC and mobile advertising.
Topeka Changes Its Name To Google, Kansas (Temporarily)
2010: What would you do to get Google to build a super high-speed broadband network in your hometown? If you were the city of Topeka, Kansas, you changed your name to Google, Kansas.
AT&T Picks Yahoo Over Google To Provide Search On First Android Phone
2010: Yahoo scored a spot as the default search engine on the Motorola Backflip, AT&T’s first phone using the Android operating system.
Bartz Says Yahoo Would Consider Buyout
2010: Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz said that Yahoo would “absolutely” consider a buyout offer from “any company at the right price.”
Yahoo TimeSense: New Trends Tool Previewed At SMX West
2010: TimeSense, the company’s version of Google Trends, was a tool being used within Yahoo.
Google Testing Single Line Sitelinks?
2009: Google was testing four sitelinks on a single line (one column), directly under the snippet and above the display URL
Kumo: Microsoft Tests Search Ideas With Its Own Employees
2009: Microsoft said it was using the Kumo.com URL for internal testing purposes only.
See Yahoo’s New Image Search Ads In Yahoo News
2009: This looked similar to how Yahoo displayed image ads on the Yahoo Directory.
Yahoo-Newspaper Consortium Producing Some Mutual Gains
2009: Anecdotes suggested that the newspapers were doing well with the program.
New Tool Adds Twitter Search To Google
2009: Called Twitter Search Results on Google, it added the most recent five tweets for your search query above Google’s regular search results.
EveryZing Launches Automatic Metadata Generator For Multimedia
2009: Video search and SEO services provider EveryZing introduced MediaCloud, an online service that automatically generated search-friendly metadata for video, audio and other rich media content.
The “About 260” Problem: Google Site: Command Glitch
2007: Google confirmed the problem, noting it wouldn’t impact search rankings, and said it would be resolved in the coming weeks.
Google’s YouTube To Showcase BBC Content On Three New Channels
2007: BBC would showcase its content on BBC, BBC WorldWide and BBC News.
The Unofficial Google Censorship FAQ
2007: Answers to 35 questions related to Google censorship.
From Search Marketing Expo (SMX)
Amazon search ads: How to advertise on Amazon — profitably (SMX West 2020
Liveblog: Steve Ballmer Keynote At SMX West 2010
Report From SMX West 2010: An Overview Of Augmented Reality Mobile Apps
Past contributions from Search Engine Land’s Subject Matter Experts (SMEs)
These columns are a snapshot in time and have not been updated since publishing, unless noted. Opinions expressed in these articles are those of the author and not necessarily Search Engine Land.
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