Yahoo! JAPAN Corporation (ヤフージャパン) is a Japanese internet company, formed as a joint venture between the American internet company Yahoo! and the Japanese internet company SoftBank. Its headquarters is located in Akasaka, Minato, Tokyo.
Yahoo! JAPAN was founded on April 22, 1996. The company’s profit is 92.174 million yen (FY 2010) and the revenue is 292.423 million yen (FY 2010). The official website is https://www.yahoo.co.jp/. In 2009, the site had over 1.9 billion daily accesses, and in 2010 the search engine migrated to Google, becoming the most used in Japan by 2020.
Yahoo is practically everywhere in the world, and although it standardizes some things, it changes a few aspects from one country to another. Here in Brazil, for example, the logo is purple. However, Yahoo! Japan has been red since its launch. The page design was changed in 2013. In April 2016, it was announced that the Yahoo! JAPAN service would always be SSL, always HTTPS (secure version of data transfer) until the end of March 2017.
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How did Yahoo! come about?
Yahoo! was developed in the United States in 1994 by Jerry Yang and David Filo. They were university students at Stanford. The goal of developing the platform was to catalog interesting websites on the internet; initially, the plan was for personal use. However, Yahoo! ended up gaining popularity among people outside the university.
Nowadays, it is impossible to say that one does not know Yahoo! and besides being a site for research and information, it has internet products and services. In 2016, Yahoo! was purchased by Verizon Communications, becoming its subsidiary through Oath Inc.
Platform in Japan
Initially, Yahoo! Japan was developed only for computers, as at that time there was no easy access via mobile phone like today. But after 2010, they began to have a mobile version of the site with personalized services. In 2000, Yahoo Search Technology (YST), a search engine originally developed by Yahoo! United States, began to be used.
In 2009, Yahoo! United States set aside YST and switched searches to Microsoft’s Bing, but Yahoo! Japan preferred to continue using Google due to its solid search engine in the Japanese environment. Also, the advertising distribution systems are still linked to the search today. Yahoo also partnered with Twitter to provide real-time information for tweets. Yahoo! Search’s “Personalized Search” ended on March 31, 2019.
The main services offered by Yahoo! Japan are:
Yahoo Auctions: one of the largest auctions on the internet in Japan.
Yahoo Shopping: shopping portal and store openings.
Yahoo Travel: sales of travel products.
Yahoo Loco: a service that collects map information and regional information, called “the largest geoservice in Japan.”
Yahoo Finance: data on stocks, taxes, and Japanese real estate. It is possible to register a specific company, and a stock fluctuation report will be created. Since August 2012, the free service in Japan updates stock prices in real-time.
Yahoo Kids: searches for websites for children.
Yahoo! Search: search/research.
Yahoo! Calendar: calendar for registration and activating date reminders.
Yahoo Mail: free email service.
Yahoo! Chiebukuro: a knowledge community and knowledge search service where users share what they know on electronic bulletin boards.
Yahoo! Research: a service where you can earn a reward (T point) when the target monitor answers the questionnaire.
Yahoo! Bookstore: an e-book sales site operated by Yahoo! JAPAN. It is different from Yahoo! Books.
GYAO!: TV/video streaming service on the internet operated by Yahoo! Japan in cooperation with GYAO Co., Ltd. The service is paid.
Yahoo! Mobage: focused on games.
Yahoo! Automobile: provides data on some commercial vehicles, mainly passenger cars released after 1990. Comments from registered users are also published. In 2013, it was integrated into “carview”.
Yahoo! News: news in partnership with news companies.
Yahoo! Premium: a membership system that offers benefits such as the ability to use various paid services, like listing Yahoo! auctions and bidding in specific categories (real estate, automobiles, etc.) and increasing the Yahoo point acquisition rate by paying a fixed fee.
Yahoo! Box: online storage service, free up to 5 GB.
Yahoo! toto: sales site for sports promotion lottery (football lottery, such as toto and toto BIG).
Yahoo! Browser: a browser application with many functions, such as automatic optimization function, voice reading function, and QR code reading function. Available only for Android.
Yahoo! Movie: provides information about movies.
Yahoo! Kisekae: the user can change their Yahoo! browser.
VIVO Basket: service for live distribution of national basketball games.
Yahoo! Job Catalog: provides company research information and word-of-mouth from employees. Job catalog.
New updates
According to The Japan Times, the most recent update made to Yahoo! Japan was to close comment sections in cases of defamatory posts. The new feature was launched on October 19, 2021. It uses artificial intelligence called the Z Holding Corp unit to prevent any user from sending or receiving such comments.
At the beginning of the change, Yahoo Japan deleted posts it considered defamatory and suspended posts from users who repeatedly violated the site’s comment policy. Online defamation has become an increasingly discussed topic in Japan, following the possible impact that negative comments about the marriage of Princess Mako to commoner Kei Komuro may have caused in the development of complex post-traumatic stress disorder. The marriage faced criticism due to a financial scandal involving Komuro’s mother.
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