Yahoo eats a lot

Finally, in mid-1997, it moved into the field of online communities and offered an Internet access service, thus becoming AOL's main competitor. Electronic shopping is only a recent development, but Yahoo is playing all the fields : it offers the thousands of companies listed in its directory the opportunity to create shops on its site, and didn't hesitate to negotiate a deal with Amazon worth several tens of million dollars, to insert a line of hypertext on each of its pages. It has also installed a series of comparison shoppers of the Acses type, concluded sponsoring deals with companies and continues to rake in advertising revenue. The 1994 version of Yahoo was for finding information. The 1999 version is also for finding products. From an information medium, it has become an economic medium, or quite simply, a seller. Through over 27,000 shops, around 2 million products are now available on Yahoo.

In terms of Internet jargon, the sites which incorporate several services of a basically different nature are known as portal sites. The majority of the main search engines (Excite/http://www.ecxite.com, Hotbot/http://www.hotbot.com, Lycos/http://www.lycos.com) have adopted this strategy, but have also been joined by sites with a totally different origin such as MSN/http://www.microsoft.com, Netscape/http://www.netscape.com.

The composition mix of a portal site is fairly standard. It is made up of a research service (Web directory, search engine, yellow pages, white pages), the availability of free services and information (e-mail, small ads, financial updates), discussion groups, sponsoring deals, advertising and electronic commerce systems inspired by Yahoo !

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