Yahoo joins hands with HP to hook more customers

Yahoo’s home page will just be a click away from the European and US consumers, as Hewlett Packard and the web giant have stuck a deal, wherein HP will feature Yahoo’s home page and other services on their new computers.

On Thursday, Yahoo revealed that the computers sold in Europe will show their home page as soon as the viewers open the internet browser, while those in North America will get a co-branded search toolbar.

In harmonization with HP, Yahoo is seeking to bait more customers to view its web sites and search engines.

Yahoo made a similar deal with Acer computers last month, whereas rival Google has its deal stuck with Dell.

Sue Feldman, an analyst with IDC in Framingham, Massachusetts, said that the idea to be the default setting is very beneficial as people normally don’t change their settings often.

Headquartered in Sunnyvale, California, Yahoo! Inc. is an American computer services company. It operates an Internet portal, the Yahoo! Directory and a host of other services including Yahoo! Mail. It was founded by Stanford graduate students Jerry Yang and David Filo in January of 1994 and incorporated on March 2, 1995.

According to Web trends companies Alexa Internet and Netcraft, Yahoo is the most visited website on the internet today with more than 412 million unique users.

Dan Rosensweig, Yahoo chief operating officer, said that the best way to hook customers is to provide them quick access to what they want to see and create the environment they prefer. "Businesses are built on eyeballs. The higher quality, the more distribution that you have, the more value you can create," he said.

Yahoo's popularity has increased manifolds, from the time it has come into operation and so has the range of features it offers, making it a kind of one-stop shop for all the popular activities of the Internet.

In the midst of a hard week, the deal has come up like a positive sign for Hewlett Packard, one of the world’s largest information technology corporation.

Besides being a software and hardware company, Hewlett Packard has won accolades for the range of products and services it offers.