Welcome to the Essential Yahoo! Series. Yahoo is a search engine, an email provider and much, much more all rolled into one. We’re on the Yahoo homepage and here you can see all of the services Yahoo provides. To make the most out of Yahoo, create an account. When you create an account you’ll have your very own email account as well and be able to personalize Yahoo to suit your needs.
To get started, click on sign up, fill-up this form, and creat a username and password. You can use some of these suggestions. This is also how you sign in to your Yahoo mail then enter an alternate email in case you forget your password and choose an answer security question as well. Type the security code you see here and check this box if you agree to the terms of service and create your account. Then just sign in to your Yahoo account and you’ll see your account has been created and you can begin customizing your Yahoo homepage and using your new email account.
Yahoo search can help you find jut what you’re looking for on the internet, whether it’s a website, a product or even an image. To search for something on the web, enter your term in here. I’ll search for movie listings in San Francisco. You’ll see that here, Yahoo is suggesting terms that may help me narrow down my search. I’ll select the first one, and here are my results. If you click on this arrow, you’ll see related searches that you can use. You can also do an image search, click here, and then enter in what you’re looking for. I’ll do a search for sunset. You use these options as well and choose specific image sizes, and choose between color or black and white. If you click on the image you’ll see the web page where it appears and you can choose to view the image itself, email it to a friend, and save it.
You can also search for Yahoo video, Yahoo local which is based on where you live or where you’ll be traveling, shopping and more like Yahoo answers or jobs. You can also choose to do an advance search, and then include or remove search results containing certain words or phrases.
When you sign up for Yahoo account, you’ll receive an email account as well. When you're logged in to Yahoo, you’ll immediately see that you have mail right here from the Yahoo homepage when you hover over the mail icon. You’ll see summary of your most recent emails. Click here to go to your inbox. This works just like most email accounts you may have set up. You can view your messages, drafts, sent mails, spam, etcetera. There’s a place where you can add your contacts, create a calendar and a note pad where you can jot things down that you need to remember.
You can search for specific email from someone by searching here and you click on check mail, you’ll immediately see if you have any new messages. If you want to receive a mail on your mobile phone, you can set up a Yahoo mobile account by entering in your cell number here and then following the instructions you receive via text message.
In episode three of this series, I showed you how to check your mail and the basics of your Yahoo mail account. There are some nice features you can enable though to make it fit your own style. In your inbox, click on options, here you can do things like change the color of your mail account. Just choose the one that you like best.
You can also change the settings of your mail. Like, when they mark the messages red. Changing the font, and you can create an email signature that will appear at the end of all the email you sent out, just add what you wanted to say here and make sure you click save.
You can change your settings for spam, and set a vacation responder. When you turn on the vacation responder, it means that people who send you mail during a period of time when your away, will receive a note telling them you’ll get back to them when you return. Go through these settings to make them work best for you.
Another really nice feature is that when you’re composing a new message to someone. You can choose a specific stationary on which your message will appear. There are a lot of different choices and you can browse by category to really personalize it to that person you’re sending the email to.
On the Yahoo homepage, you’ll see an option of messenger. Messenger allows you to chat online with your friends and family who are logged into Yahoo when you are. First you need to download it. If you don’t want to download it though, you can use messenger on the web, this allows you to chat without downloading anything. Let’s take a look.
So first sign in, you can sign in as invisible which means when you sign in none of your contacts will see that you actually signed in. So here we are in Yahoo messenger. You can add contacts to chat with by entering in your Yahoo or Windows Live username here. Just click your name when you want to chat with them. Type your message down here and either click send or hit enter. This is where you had your conversation. You can also change the font and even add smily faces to your chat and I have a response. You can mark yourself as available, busy, stepped out or you can right your own custom status message the people you’re connected to will see.
You can also add contacts to a group to help organize them. I’ll call this one “coworkers”. You can have multiple chats going on once and switch to different ones by clicking on this tabs. You can also click on the “X” to close a chat tab.
Yahoo Answers is a very useful feature that allows you to ask and answer questions on just about any topic. So let's say I want to know how long to boil a hard boiled egg. Fist, I’ll type in my question here to see if it’s already been asked and answered then click search. Here are a whole bunch of similar questions others have asked. This is pretty much exactly what I was looking for. Click on it and you’ll see the question along with answers other Yahoo users left.
You can vote the answers up or down if you think there accurate or not. In lot of cases you’ll see the best answer that was chosen by voters at the top. On the homepage, you can browse through different categories of questions; you can see questions that need answers. Browse through result questions and vote on undecided questions. If you didn’t find the answer to the question you had, ask it here. Just give it a title and a brief description then place it in a category so it will be easy to find, and chose if you want to be notified via email when it’s answered. Next preview it and if your satisfied you can submit it and that’s it.
Right now we’re on the Yahoo homepage. You can create your very own Yahoo homepage by clicking on My Yahoo. This is where you can add or remove content that you want to see when you log into you’re My Yahoo account. Right now this is section for news, a preview of my mail, my weather forecast and Yahoo entertainment news just to name a few. You can rearrange these modules by dragging and dropping them into the order you like. You can also delete them by clicking on the “X”.
You can also set preferences for some of these apps which they’re known as. “To choose to display certain number of settings” and choose how much information you want to share. You can email them to friends as well here. If you click on add content, you can find more apps to add to your page. Some are informative and some are just for fun. Click on add to whatever app you want to add. If there is a web site you’d like to have appear on your site as well just enter in the URL here and it will appear on your page. And here it is.
You can add multiple tabs to hold different content like one for news and one for fun. Just name it and then click on add content. And add whatever you want to the page. You can change the appearance of your page by selecting a theme here or customizing your own color.
The best of My Yahoo allows you to find the most popular apps to add to your page. Just click on the app that you want and drag it on top of the tab where you want it to go. Release it and it’s moved. You can access all of Yahoo’s other services by clicking on the quick links. This is your page so make it look the way you like best.
Yahoo gives you a great way to find your way around with Yahoo maps. Click on the maps link from the Yahoo homepage. Of course, you can do a basic direction search by entering in your beginning and ending points, then click on go. You can also add multiple locations; get reverse directions or roundtrip directions. You can do a business search as well. If you don’t like the route you’re given, you can click and drag the lines to change the route. Click here to go back to your original route.
You can zoom in or out using the slider or quickly jump to country, state, city or street view. To remove any part of the directions, just click on the “X”.
In episode eight of this series I showed you how to search for directions using Yahoo maps. Now I’ll go over some extra features. Since I’m logged in to my Yahoo account, it knows my location. And by default, my map is showing San Francisco. You can enter any location here, and be brought to that area on the map. You can also search for business here. You’ll see a listing of matching results and if you click on one, you’ll see if there are any ratings and you can rate it yourself.
You can also get directions, email it to a friend and edit its location if you are the owner or customer. You can also simply right mouse click anywhere on the map and get directions to or from this location. Right now, we’re viewing a map view. But you can change it to hybrid or satellite. You can also click here to view live traffic for the area you are viewing. This is especially useful if you are traveling to a typically congested area. This shows you how to read the traffic symbols. You can also create a printable version of the map to take with you.
In episode seven of the series, I showed you how to create a custom My Yahoo page that you can access here. But you can simply use the Yahoo homepage as your own information center. This page already contains information like the latest stories in featured, entertainment, sports and video. You can even play videos right from here. You can also instantly see the latest news stories in the world, local and finance, you can see featured Yahoo services and access the huge list of all the services Yahoo provides. In this series I briefly covered some of Yahoo’s services but as you can see there’s a lot more to offer that I can explain in ten episodes. So make sure to check all of these out.
Here you can also access your mail, Yahoo messenger to chat with your friends, puzzles, weather, events in your area and your horoscope. You can also change the way this page looks by changing the color, or by switching to a narrow view.
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