10 Interesting Facts About Yahoo!

1. Stanford Student’s Jerry Yang and David Filo first started Yahoo! in February of 1994 to keep track of their own interests online. They named their project “Jerry’s Guide to the World Wide Web. The site was a directory of other websites, organized in a hierarchy, as opposed to a searchable index of pages.

 

2. In March 1994, "Jerry and David's Guide to the World Wide Web" was renamed Yahoo. Which is an acronym for “Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle. The "yahoo.com" domain was created on January 18, 1995. The term "hierarchical" described how the Yahoo database was arranged in layers of subcategories. The term "oracle" was intended to mean "source of truth and wisdom", and the term "officious", rather than being related to the word's normal meaning, described the many office workers who would use the Yahoo database while surfing from work.

3. Yang and Filo added the exclamation point to the end of Yahoo! because “Yahoo” was already owned by a company that produced BBQ sauce.

4. The owners of Yahoo considered buying Google before went public. Yahoo Chief Terry Semel had dinner with Larry Page and Sergey Brin and he asked to buy Google. Then Larry and Sergey replied that they wanted $1 billion and didn't want to sell. Another dinner and Semel agreed to the $1 billion. Larry and Sergey replied that they wanted $3 billion and didn't want to sell. However, at the time Yahoo decided that a few billion dollars was too much to pay to buy out their competitor.

5. Yahoo’s email service, which they purchased from Four11 in 1997. Yahoo! acquired Four11 for $96 million. Yahoo Mail was the third-largest web-based email service with 281 million users as of December 2011 and still considered to be the most popular email program in America.

6. In 2006 Yahoo’s image search gained criticism for displaying sexually explicit images in their results, even when the SafeSearch was on. Less than a year later the image search feature was shut down and replaced with Yahoo’s recently acquired Flickr photo sharing community. Yahoo buy flickr for  $22 to $25 million.

7. Yahoo currently owns and operates over fifty different web properties, most of which are sites that gained popularity before being acquired by Yahoo. Some examples include Geocities, Yahoo! Games, Del.icio.us, Flickr, and Upcoming.org. 

8. One of Yahoo’s highest priced acquisitions was Broadcast.com, which they paid a reported $5.7 billion for. On the other hand, their cheapest acquisition was their purchase of Net Controls for slightly over $1 million in 1997.

9. 9. In March of 2005 Yahoo celebrated it’s 10 year anniversary by giving away free Baskin Robins ice cream coupons to all of their users.

 

10. Yahoo began as a project created by two individuals and has grown to employ estimated 13,000 full time individuals. 

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