Yahoo! is an Internet service company providing news, email, a directory, and a web portal. Yahoo was founded by Jerry Yang and David Filo while the two were studying as graduate students at Stanford University. Prior to the advent of competing search engine Google, Yahoo! was the Web's most popular search engine.

On June 11, 2009, Yahoo! named Tim Morse as its Chief Financial Officer. Morse, a former General Electric executive, served as CFO of Altera Corp. before the switch to Yahoo! His compensation was set at $500,000 annually, with a possible 100% bonus.Bloomberg: Yahoo Taps Ex-GE Executive Tim Morse as Finance Chief

The idea of the company was born when Yang started a web page with a listing of his favorite links. By the end of 1994, the website was renamed to "Yahoo!" based on the Jonathan Swift story, Gulliver's Travels. That same year, the company received 1 million unique visitors. A year later, on March 1, 1995, Yahoo! went public.

At the height of the late 1990s, early 2000 tech bubble, Yahoo was trading in excess of $400 a share. It was also the only company to reach ¥100,000,000 in Japan at the time. In September 2001, Yahoo! stock had plummeted to an all-time low of approximately $4.00 a share. Since then the company has responded to heavy competition with Google by diversifying its product base, cutting internal costs, and making strategic partnerships (i.e. Verizon in 2005).

The Wall Street Journal reported in December 2008 that former AOL CEO Jonathan Miller may be consulting with private equity and foreign wealth funds to raise money for a possible Yahoo! buyout. Miller is said to need to raise between $28 to $30 billion to accomplish a buyout.VentureBeat: Miller May Make a Run... (December 2, 2008)

On February 1, 2008, Microsoft made an offer to purchase Yahoo! for $44.6 billion. However, this offer was declined by the company because the board felt that the offer was too low.

Yahoo! plans to go ahead with a $100 million data center in Nebraska, despite the economic slump and the fact that 1500 workers were laid off from Yahoo!'s staff in October, 2008. The Nebraska data center would result in an additional 100 jobs.Seattle Examiner: Despite slump, Yahoo plans new operations... (October 27, 2008)