www.aol.com

         AOL Inc. (NYSE: AOL), formerly known as America Online and logo typeset as "Aol.", is an American global Internet services and media company. AOL is headquartered at 770 Broadway in New York. Founded in 1983 as Control Video Corporation, it has franchised its services to companies in several nations around the world or set up international versions of its services.

          AOL is best known for its online software suite, also called AOL, that allowed customers to access the world's largest "walled garden" online community and eventually reach out to the internet as a whole. At its zenith, AOL's membership was over 30 million members worldwide, most of whom accessed the AOL service through the AOL software suite.

          On May 28, 2009, Time Warner announced that it would spin off AOL into a separate public company. The spin off occurred on December 9, 2009, ending the 8 year relationship between the two companies.

Link: http://www.aol.com/

www.yahoo.com

           The two founders of Yahoo!, David Filo and Jerry Yang, Ph.D. candidates in Electrical Engineering at Stanford University, started their student hobby in a campus trailer in February 1994 as a way to keep track of their personal interests on the Internet. Before long they were spending more time on their home-brewed lists of favorite links than on their doctoral dissertations. Eventually, Jerry and David's lists became too long and unwieldy, and they broke them out into categories, then subcategories…and thus the core concept behind Yahoo! was born.

          The Web site started out as "Jerry and David's Guide to the World Wide Web" but eventually received a new moniker with the help of a dictionary. The name Yahoo! is an acronym for "Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle," but Jerry and David insist they selected the name because of its definition: "rude, unsophisticated, uncouth."

          Before long, hundreds of people were accessing their guide from well beyond the Stanford trailer. Yahoo! celebrated its first million-hit day in the fall of 1994, translating to almost 100,000 unique visitors. In April 1995, Sequoia Capital agreed to fund Yahoo! with an initial investment of nearly $2 million. Realizing the new company had the potential to grow quickly, Jerry and David began to shop for a management team. They hired Tim Koogle, a veteran of Motorola and an alumnus of the Stanford engineering department, as chief executive officer and Jeffrey Mallett, founder of Novell's WordPerfect consumer division, as chief operating officer. They secured a second round of funding in the Fall 1995 from investors Reuters Ltd. and Softbank. Yahoo! launched a highly-successful IPO in April 1996 with a total of 49 employees.

           Now, almost fifteen years later, Yahoo! continues to grow its talent and audience with 13,200 Yahoos (employees) and more than 600 million unique visitors.

Link: http://www.yahoo.com/

www.google.com

         Founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin named the search engine they built "Google," a play on the word "googol," the mathematical term for a "1 followed by 100 zeros". The name reflects the immense volume of information that exists, and the scope of Google's mission: to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful.

Quick Facts about Google:

Founded: 1998
Founders: Larry Page and Sergey Brin
Incorporation: September 4, 1998
Initial public offering (NASDAQ): August 19, 2004
Headquarters: 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway, Mountain View, CA 94043
Offices: Located  around the world.

Link: http://www.google.com/