Yahoo!
Identification Internet services company
Date Founded in 1994
The company’s founders created one of the first successful
Internet directories and one of the leading Web sites on the
Internet during the 1990’s.
Yahoo started in January of 1994 at Stanford Univer-
sity as a project by Jerry Yang and David Filo and was
hosted on the university’s servers. Its original name
was Jerry and David’s Guide to the World Wide Web
and was intended to help people locate Web sites on
the Internet according to categories such as sports,
entertainment, computers. The site was designed to
help people to explore the Internet rather than to
direct them to specifically searched sites. The site
was renamed Yahoo!, and the inclusion of the excla-
mation point in the name was to avoid copyright in-
fringement.One of the advantages of using the name Yahoo!
was that it was memorable. It was necessarily hierar-
chical in nature, which eventually led to the
backronym “Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Or-
acle.” The founders designed the Web site so that it
could be maintained with a minimum of effort by
keeping the descriptions of the sites short, with little
revision as the referenced sites grew and changed.
The number of visitors to the site had doubled every
month since its inception, and, as a result, the found-
ers were asked by the university to move the site off
campus since the traffic was crashing the system.
The partners found a venture capitalist who saw
the potential of the site, which already was attracting
one million visitors per week. The site was moved,
and the founders dropped out of Stanford to run
their venture. Yahoo! was incorporated in March,
1995, and is based in Sunnyvale, California. It diver-
sified into a Web portal and rushed to acquire
companies to expand its range of services so that it952 Yahoo! The Nineties in AmericaYahoo! founders David Filo, left, and Jerry Yang display a fish prop at the company’s headquarters in Santa Clara, California, in
- The Internet services company sold 2.6 million shares at $13 each in its initial public offering in April, 1996.(AP/Wide
World Photos)