| Like many other
aspects of the computer age, Yahoo! began as an idea, grew into a hobby
and lately has turned into a full-time passion. The two developers of
Yahoo!, David Filo and Jerry Yang, Ph.D. candidates in Electrical
Engineering at Stanford University, started their guide in April 1994 as a
way to keep track of their personal interests on the Internet. Before
long they found that their home-brewed lists were becoming too long and
unwieldy. Gradually they began to spend more and more time on Yahoo!.
During 1994 they converted Yahoo! into a customized database designed to
serve the needs of the thousands of users that began to use the service
through the closely bound Internet community. They developed customized
software to help them efficiently locate, identify and edit material
stored on the Internet. The name Yahoo! is supposed to stand for "Yet
Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle" but Filo and Yang insist they
selected the name because they considered themselves yahoos. Yahoo!
itself first resided on Yang's student workstation, "akebono" while the
search engine was lodged on Filo's computer, "konishiki." (These machines
were named after legendary Hawaiian sumo wrestlers.)
In early 1995 Marc Andreessen, co-founder of Netscape Communications
in Mountain View, Ca., invited Filo and Yang to move their files over to
larger computers housed at Netscape. As a result Stanford's computer
network returned to normal, and both parties benefited. Today, Yahoo!
contains organized information on tens of thousands of computers linked to
the Web. The San Jose Mercury news recently noted that "Yahoo is closest
in spirit to the work of Linnaeus, the 18th century botanist whose
classification system organized the natural world." |
