Tech Directions - November 2007 - (Page 15)

effort was to acquire the online communications company Four11 in 1997, renaming its Web e-mail service Yahoo Mail, which competed initially with Microsoft’s Hotmail. Soon afterward it also acquired eGroups, which became Yahoo Groups and it still is the Web’s most popular e-mail based discussion group platform. At about the same time the company launched Yahoo Messenger to compete with AOL Instant Messenger. Yahoo survived the dot-com bubble of 2000-2001, but its stock price plummeted from an all-time high of $450 a share in January 2000 to an all-time low of $8.11 in September 2001. Shopping has been entirely positive. Yahoo Auctions was never positioned well to compete against eBay. From the outset it greatly limited buyers’ ability to communicate and warn one another about scams in the works, and it let sellers automatically extend auctions if a bid was received shortly before an auction’s close, eliminating “sniping,” a key benefit for buyers. Yahoo Mail and Yahoo Groups remain popular services, and deservedly so. But the anti-spam filters of these services function poorly, falsely reporting many e-mails and posts as spam. My personal attempts over many months to prevent my own e-mail and posts from falsely being flagged have been met with canned responses and inaction by Yahoo. Others have reported the same. Still, Yahoo is one of the Internet’s heroes. Here’s hoping that Jerry Yang is able to do with Yahoo what Steve Jobs did with Apple 10 years ago. What Yahoo’s Doing To deal with Web search juggernaut Google, Yahoo first licensed Google’s search engine. Then Yahoo began acquiring other search engines, including Inktomi, AltaVista, and AlltheWeb. Four years after partnering with Google, in 2004 Yahoo dropped it to return to using its internal search technology. In response to Google’s launching its highly regarded Gmail Web e-mail service in 2004, Yahoo first expanded the storage limits of Yahoo Mail users and then in May of this year began offering unlimited storage. It also acquired e-mail provider Oddpost to create a new Yahoo Mail interface. Some of Yahoo’s services have been better executed than others. Its Yahoo Shopping service has long been a convenient way to shop online and bargain hunt. You can browse in numerous departments or search for a particular type of product or brand name. Yahoo Shopping lists the products from lowest priced to highest and rates merchants from one to five stars. A recent investigation by PC World magazine, however, showed that many merchants rated highly by Yahoo had poor ratings from the Better Business Bureau. The same was true for other online shopping services. “Ratings and reviews can be faked,” according to the magazine. My own experience with Yahoo www.techdirections.com MASTERING COMPUTERS 15 http://www.intelitek.com http://www.techdirections.com

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Tech Directions - November 2007

Tech Directions - November 2007 Technically Speaking Contents Direct from Washington The News Report Technology’s Past Technology Today Mastering Computers Video Game Programmers Learn to “Pitch” Project Teaches Students to Diagnose an Ailing Windows OS See the Math with Your Binoculars! Fire Safety Technician ACTE Convention and Career Tech Expo Hands-On Activities More than Fun

Tech Directions - November 2007

For optimal viewing of this digital publication, please enable JavaScript and then refresh the page. If you would like to try to load the digital publication without using Flash Player detection, please click here.