The History Of Yahoo

Yahoo Inc, is the owner of famous search engine and email client, Yahoo.com. Yahoo is the second most popular visited website in the world and the U.S.. It is thriving and has been around for 10+ years, but how did Yahoo! get started and who was behind this sensational site? Here is the history of Yahoo Inc.

The year 1994 was a promising year for Yahoo Inc.’s founders, Jerry Yang and David Filo. They were graduate students at Stanford University studying Electrical Engineering,  when in April they renamed their “Jerry and David's Guide to the World Wide Web" to “Yahoo!”.


They renamed it because it was a part of the expansion for “Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle".  They picked that name, because they liked what it meant. When the end for 1994 rolled around, Yahoo! already had one million hits.

They finally bought the domain, Yahoo.com in January 1995 and switched the site to that URL instead of their older one. Filo and Yang noticed that they were on to something and quickly had it incorporated. In April of 1995, Sequoia Capital’s Michael Moritz gave Yang and Filo them $3 million help them in raising capital for their venture. By 1996, they were able to start public trading.

In the late 1990’s, Yahoo! became a Web portal. With the growth of Web portals, many companies got absorbed and Yahoo was one of the absorbers. Here is the break down of sites Yahoo acquired. Four11:They owed rocket mail email service. When Yahoo bought them, they changed it to Yahoo mail.
Classicgames: Yahoo changed it to Yahoo Games.
Yoyodyne Entertainment Inc: Yahoo Pager(later on, became Yahoo Messenger)
GeoCities: It became Yahoo GeoCities
eGroups: Yahoo called Yahoo Groups.

During the dotcom bubble’s highest point, Yahoo!’s shares were worth a lot of money. Even though in 2000, at one point Yahoo!’s domain was under a distributed denial of service attack, the next day their shares rose. Also during 2000, eBay and Yahoo! thought about a 50/50 merger, though they never did happen. Instead 6 years later, they partnered with each other for advertising. The summer of 2006, Google and Yahoo! both signed an agreement, so Google could stay the default search engine and Yahoo! could go into BETA.

During the dot-com bubble burst, Yahoo was one of the few lucky ones, meaning though they lost a lot of money, they didn’t go out of business. In 2002, Yahoo! wanted to compete with mega internet service provider and web portal AOL. They partnered with SBC, BT Openworld, and Verizon to offer internet service. Later on in 2002, Yahoo! started to acquire search engines and left the contract with Google and started using their own technology in 2004.

Also in 2004, Yahoo! felt threatened by Google’s release of Gmail, so they upgraded all free email accounts to 3 more Gigabytes then they initially offered. For their paid users, they offered 2 more GB. Though later on, they did take the meter out, giving all users unlimited storage.

In 2005, Microsoft and Yahoo! agreed on allow both of their instant messengers to work together. Yahoo Launchcast became Yahoo Music. They bought Flickr, blo.gs, Upcoming.com, webjay and del.icio.us in 2006.

Also in 2005 they launched Yahoo 360 social network to compete with MySpace and Facebook.

Yahoo! has had many offers to be bought up by Microsoft for the last three years and all have failed.

Yahoo! has been around for a long time and if they have it their way, they will stay independent as long as they t. And it just might live for another 10+ years.