Yahoo was established by a Taiwanese-born American, Jerry Yang, and his co-founder David Filo in April of 1994. At beginning of internet’s rise in 1969, its main function was for educational institutions and governmental agencies to conduct research and share information. It did not have any commercial purposes.The technology of the search engine was fairly uncommon in the initial stages in the early 1990s. The network users were required to enter the correct file name to find the sought information. It was quite time-consuming.

In fact, the international network developed rapidly, as more and more computer software engineers devoted to their time to software design in the span of just a few years. While Jerry Yang and David Filo were Doctoral students of electrical engineering at Stanford University, they wanted to develop an integrated circuit chip for computer software as the research topic of their Doctoral thesis. By chance, they created a internet website named "David and Jerry's guide to the World Wide Web,” which has a directory of their favorite links of other websites. They classified them into different themes which increased the efficiency of searching time, but as it grew in popularity and gained more visitors, they renamed their website “Yahoo!” This word originates from the beginning of each word “Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle” (an acronym for an uneducated someone who is rude and uncivilized) .

Currently, the Yahoo website offers many free services so the main income for the company is from advertising revenue. In the early 1990s, Jerry Yang and David Filo seized their opportunity to create a world in the internet market when the internet was getting warmed up. Today, Yahoo in the United States still holds great influence in the network market. Microsoft made an offer of $44.6 billion to purchase Yahoo in 2008, but Yahoo! didn’t take the deal.

This work by Eric & Chun-Chih Hadley-Ives is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.