It was founded by David Filo and Jerry Yang, Ph.D. candidates in Electrical Engineering at Stanford University. Initially, Yahoo! was only providing a browsing directory, organizing web pages into categories which were classified by human editors.
Yahoo! was founded as ‘Jerry’s Guide to the World Wide Web’. It was renamed as Yahoo in April 1994. Yahoo! is an acronym for "Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle."
As the web grew, a number of search engines appeared, Most used some sort of automated program to ‘crawl’ though the websites and extract keywords. Yahoo! used automation too but its index was assembled by Yang and Filo personally at first, later supplemented by other people.
In April 1995, Yahoo! Was funded with an initial investment of nearly $2 million USD by Sequoia Capital. Yahoo! launched a highly-successful IPO in April 1996 with a total of 49 employees. The company was valued at $850 million.
During the period of 1995 to 2001, Yahoo! Made a number of acquisitions diversifying its product an service offerings.
Among many other acquisitions Yahoo acquired four11, an online communications company, creating the so called Yahoo! Mail, then bought ClassicGames.com and turned it into Yahoo Games.
In July 2009 Yahoo and Microsoft announced that they combining their efforts in the area of internet searching.
History of Yahoo! search engine
