Short answers, pulled from the story.
Yahoo was founded by Jerry Yang and David Filo in January 1994. Both were electrical engineering graduate students at Stanford University when they launched it as "Jerry and David's Guide to the World Wide Web," a human-edited web directory. Yahoo was formally incorporated on the 2nd of March 1995.
Yahoo is a backronym for "Yet Another Hierarchically Organized Oracle" or "Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle." Founders Yang and Filo have said they primarily chose the name because they liked its slang meaning, used among college students in Louisiana in the late 1980s-early 1990s, to describe someone rude and unsophisticated. That slang derives from the Yahoo race in Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels.
Yahoo passed on two separate opportunities to acquire Google. In 1998, Larry Page and Sergey Brin offered to sell Google to Yahoo for $1 million and Yahoo declined. In 2002, Yahoo entered negotiations again but its final offer of $3 billion fell short of Google's asking price, and the deal collapsed. The second failure is widely regarded as one of the largest strategic errors in corporate history.
Yahoo disclosed two major breaches in 2016. The first, from late 2014, affected over 500 million accounts. The second, from around August 2013, was initially reported as affecting over one billion accounts. On the 3rd of October 2017, Yahoo revised that figure to state that all 3 billion of its user accounts had been compromised in the 2013 breach, making them the largest discovered breaches in Internet history at the time.
Verizon Communications acquired Yahoo's core Internet business for $4.83 billion, a deal announced on the 25th of July 2016 and completed on the 13th of June 2017. The purchase price was reduced by $350 million after the data breaches came to light, with both companies agreeing to share related liabilities. The remaining parts of Yahoo not sold to Verizon were renamed Altaba and later liquidated.
Yahoo's Hong Kong subsidiary provided Chinese authorities with user account data that contributed to the imprisonment of at least two individuals. Journalist Shi Tao was sentenced to ten years in prison in April 2005 after Yahoo supplied the IP address linked to his email account. Engineer Wang Xiaoning was arrested in September 2002 and later sentenced to ten years after Yahoo provided identifying information to authorities. A U.S. congressional panel in November 2007 said Yahoo had been at best inexcusably negligent in its congressional testimony about the Shi Tao case.