History Of Yahoo

The Yahoo Years

History of Yahoo

The Yahoo Years

Yahoo started life back in 1994, its humble beginnings were the confines of a university campus trailer, Yahoo started life as a collection of favorites put together by a couple of clever chaps called David Filo and Jerry Yang.

At this time point who would ever of guessed that this humble beginning would evolve into a global brand, lets face it the first recordable name given to this collection of Internet information was ‘Jerry and David's Guide to the World Wide Web’ the acronym for this – JDGWWW doesn’t really aspire to becoming a world leading brand.

The collection matured and expanded and soon there were categories and sub categories and this concept became the basic structure for what we see today. Obviously JDGWWW was a non starter as a name and probably never came into the heads of these clever guys, however the physical structure was growing and soon their attention did indeed turn to the subject of brand.

Yahoo is Born

Yahoo was born from a definition:- ‘uncouth, rude and unsophisticated’, of course there is a connection between this definition and the cry of ‘Yahoo’, that many recognise as being a loud way to show excitement. The common train of thought is that Yahoo was chosen due to its acronym association with the term: "Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle," although there are variations of this such as "Yet Another Hierarchical Obstreperous Oracle," and even "Yet Another Hierarchical Odiferous Oracle," but this according to Mr Filo and Mr Yang is not correct.

Within 12 months this collection of categories and sub categories would gain such popularity that it would break the threshold of one million hits in a single day. This obviously underlined the growing need to marry up the ‘peoples’ need for information with the Internet itself. This interest and popularity continued to grow rapidly and the guys realized they had the making of a business on their hands.

Soon investment followed with a respected venture capital company (Sequoia Capital) and the boys were in business. Two years later the company was incorporated with a successful IPO and the brand continued to gain strength.