History of Yahoo

Yahoo! began as a student hobby and evolved into a global brand that has changed the way people communicate with each other, find and access information and buy things. David Filo and Jerry Yang, Ph.D. graduates of Electrical Engineering at Stanford University started their guide in a campus trailer in February 1994 as a way to keep track of their personal interests on the Internet. Before long they were spending more time at their home-brewed lists of favorite links than on their doctoral dissertations. At last Jerry and David's lists too long and cumbersome, and they broke them out into categories. When the categories became too full, they developed subcategories ... and the core concept behind Yahoo! was born.

The site started out as "Jerry and David's Guide to the World Wide Web" but eventually received a new moniker with the help of a dictionary. The name Yahoo! is an acronym for "Yet another Hierarchical tormentor Oracle," but Filo and Yang insist they selected the name because they liked the general definition of a yahoo: "Rude, uncomplicated, and coarse." Yahoo! itself first resided on Yang's student workstation, "Akebono," while the software was lodged on Filo computer, "Konishiki" - both named after legendary sumo wrestlers.

Jerry and David soon found they were not alone in wanting a single place to find useful sites. Before long, hundreds of people were accessing their guide from well beyond the Stanford trailer. The word spread from friends to what quickly became a large, loyal audience throughout the closely-knit Internet community. Yahoo! celebrated its first million-hit day in autumn 1994, worth almost 100 thousand unique visitors.

Because of the flow of traffic and enthusiastic reception Yahoo! received, the founders knew they had a potential business on their hands. In March 1995, the pair incorporated the company and met with dozens of Silicon Valley venture capitalists. They eventually came across Sequoia Capital, the highly regarded firm whose most successful investments included Apple Computer, Atari, Oracle and Cisco Systems. They agreed to fund Yahoo! in April 1995 with an initial investment of nearly 2 million U.S. dollars.

Realize their new company had the potential to grow rapidly, Jerry and David began to act in a management team. They hired Tim Google, a veteran of Motorola and an Alumnus of the Stanford engineering department, as chief executive officer and Jeffrey Mallett, founder of Novell's WordPerfect Consumer Division, as Chief Operating Officer. They have secured a second round of funding in the autumn of 1995 from investors Reuters Ltd. and Softbank. Yahoo! launched a highly successful IPO in April 1996 with a total of 49 employees.

Today, Yahoo! Inc. is a leading global Internet communications, commerce and media company that offers a comprehensive branded network of services to more than 345 million people each month worldwide. As the first online navigational instruments guide to the Internet, www.yahoo.com is the leading guide in terms of traffic, advertising, household and business user reach. Yahoo! is the No. 1 Internet brand globally, and when the largest audience worldwide. The company also provides online business and enterprise services designed to increase productivity and Web presence of Yahoo! 'S customers. These services include Corporate Yahoo!, A popular custom Enterprise Portal solutions, audio and video streaming, store hosting and management, and web tools and services. The company's global Web network includes 25 World properties. Headquartered in Sunnyvale, California, Yahoo! has offices in Europe, Asia, Latin America, Australia, Canada and the USA.