Yahoo! Inc. (NASDAQ: YHOO) is an American global Internet services company. It operates an Internet portal and provides a full range of products and services including a search engine, the Yahoo! Directory and Yahoo! Mail. It was founded by Stanford graduate students Jerry Yang and David Filo in January of 1994 and incorporated on March 2, 1995. The company is headquartered in Sunnyvale, California.
According to Web trends companies among others Alexa Internet and Netcraft, Yahoo! has been the most visited website on the Internet today with more than 412 million unique users. The global network of Yahoo! websites received 3.4 billion page views per day on average as of October 2005. In November 2006 Yahoo has been battling with MySpace for the top U.S. visited website online.
In January 1994, Stanford graduate students Jerry Yang (—k’v‰“) and David Filo created a website named "Jerry"s Guide to the World Wide Web". Jerry"s Guide to the World Wide Web was a directory of other web sites, organized in a hierarchy, as opposed to a searchable index of pages.
In April 1994, "Jerry"s Guide to the World Wide Web" was renamed "Yahoo!". "Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle" is a backronym for this name, but Filo and Yang insist they selected the name because they liked the word"s general definition, as in Gulliver"s Travels by Jonathan Swift: "rude, unsophisticated, uncouth."
By the end of 1994, Yahoo! had already received one million hits. Yang and Filo realized their website had m***ive business potential, and on 2 March 1995, Yahoo! was incorporated. On 12 April 1996, Yahoo! had its initial public offering, raising $33.8 million dollars, by selling 2.6 million shares at $13 each.
"Yahoo" had already been trademarked for barbecue sauce, knives (by EBSCO Industries) and human propelled watercraft (by Old Town Canoe Co.). Therefore, in order to get the trademark, Yang and Filo added the exclamation mark to the name. However, the exclamation mark is often incorrectly omitted when referring to Yahoo!.
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