A brief history of Yahoo

In January 1994, two Stanford University Electrical Engineering graduate students created a website called “David and Jerry’s Guide to the World Wide Web.” Jerry Yang and David Filo created this website as a directory for other websites on the Internet. Their website offered a list of links that, when a keyword was entered, the one with the most visits appeared first. This new process was organized by popularity rather than searching a page index that could take several minutes and in some cases even hours to find the information you were looking for. Therefore, the way search engines worked on the Internet changed forever.

Before the end of 1994, Filo and Yang’s website had received more than a million visits. Seeking a more attractive name for their now popular website, the couple changed the name in April 1994 to “Yahoo!” Filo and Yang liked the general definition of the word, which came from an imaginary race of people in Jonathan Swift’s classic novel “Gulliver’s Travels.” These “Yahoo!” characters embodied many negative traits, such as being rude, rude, and unsophisticated. The founders thought this term better fit their new form of search engine, as it was so unconventional compared to other search engines of the early 1990s. On January 18, 1994 the name was made official. domain yahoo.com.

Since the trademark name “Yahoo” was used by many companies for products such as knives, jet skis, and barbecue sauce, the two decided to use an exclamation point in the name. Unfortunately, the exclamation point is generally left out of the end of the name when referring to Yahoo! as it has become a household name.

Yang and Filo soon realized that with over a million views to their credit, Yahoo! it had enormous business potential. Yahoo! was incorporated on March 2, 1995. Once the company obtained two rounds of venture capital from Michael Moritz of Sequoia Capital for the sum of $ 3 million in April 1995, the search engine was up and running. The company soon went public at $ 13.00 a share. Yahoo! He sold 2.6 million shares and raised $ 33.8 million for his fledgling company in the 1990s.

Since the 1990s, Yahoo! it has changed the way we surf the web. Yahoo! has expanded its empire by launching its own email service, gaming site, and advertising divisions. This valuable search tool has not only revolutionized the Internet and how we use it today, it has also transformed a simple idea into one of the most recognized brands in the world.

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