Yahoo!
Yahoo grew rapidly throughout the 1990s. Yahoo went public in April 1996 and its stock price rose by 600 percent within two years. Like many search engines and web directories, Yahoo added a web portal, putting it in competition with services like Excite, Lycos and America Online. By 1998, Yahoo was the most popular starting point for web users, and the human-edited Yahoo Directory the most popular search engine, receiving 95 million page views per day which was triple the number compared to rival Excite. It also made many high-profile acquisitions. Yahoo began offering free e-mail from October 1997 after the acquisition of RocketMail, which was then renamed to Yahoo! Mail. In 1998, Yahoo! decided to replace AltaVista as the crawler-based search engine underlying the Directory with Inktomi. Yahoo's two biggest acquisitions were made in 1999 - that of Geocities for $3.6 billion, and Broadcast.com for $5.7 billion.
History of Gmail
Gmail was a project started by Google developer Paul Buchheit, who had already explored the idea of web-based email in the 1990s, before the launch of Hotmail, while working on a personal email software project as a college student. Buchheit began his work on Gmail in August 2001. At Google, Buchheit had first worked on Google Groups and when asked "to build some type of email or personalization product", he created the first version of Gmail in one day, reusing the code from Google Groups. The project was known by the code name "Caribou", a reference to a Dilbert comic strip about Project Caribou.