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 hits would appear first. This new process was organized by popularity rather than searching through an index of pages which could take several minutes and in some cases even hours to find the information one was looking for. Thus, the way Internet search engines worked was forever changed.

By the end of 1994, Filo and Yang’s website had received over a million hits. Seeking a catchier 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 comes from an imaginary race of people in Jonathan Swift’s classic novel “Gulliver’s Travels.” These so-called “Yahoo” characters embodied many negative traits, such as being rude, crude, and unsophisticated. The founders thought this term was a better fit for their new form of search engine, as it was very unconventional compared to other search engines of the early 1990s. On January 18, 1994, the domain name was made official. yahoo.com.

Since many companies used the trade name “Yahoo” for products like knives, jet skis, and barbecue sauce, the two decided to use an exclamation point in the name. Unfortunately, the exclamation point is usually left at the end of the name when referring to Yahoo! since it has become a household name.

Yang and Filo soon realized that with over a million hits to their credit, Yahoo! had tremendous business potential. yahoo! it was incorporated on March 2, 1995. Once the company secured two rounds of venture capital from Sequoia Capital’s Michael Moritz to the tune of $3 million in April 1995, the search engine went live. The company soon began trading on the stock market at $13.00 per 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 navigate 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, but has also transformed a simple idea into one of the most recognized brands in the world.