Yahoo! (Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle)
Yahoo! is one of the best-known and most highly regarded of the many Web-based search engines. Because of its own extensive collections of hotlists and pointers, it's a great place to start looking for just about anything. It's one of our favorite stops on the Web, and we imagine you'll find it equally interesting when you visit the URL below.
Yahoo! (which in addition to being an acronym also captures its founders' zest for information retrieval) began as an academic concept that grew into a hobby and recently, in the words of its founders, " has turned into a full-time passion." Yahoo! originated in the fertile minds of David Filo and Jerry Yang, while they were both Ph.D. candidates in Electrical Engineering at Stanford University. The dynamic duo started the service in April 1994, as a personal tool to help them track their Internet interests. Soon they were overwhelmed by the volume of data involved, and began to devote themselves more and more exclusively to Yahoo!
Later in 1994 Filo and Yang converted Yahoo! into a customized database that could serve the needs of thousands of users as more and more people began to access the service via the Web. Yang and Filo developed specialized software to help them efficiently locate, identify and edit material anywhere on the Internet. The originators insist their choice of the name is solely because they considered themselves yahoos (as in the savages Lemuel Gulliver encountered on his fictional travels).
Yahoo! itself first resided on Yang's student workstation, "akebono" while the search engine was lodged on Filo's computer, "konishiki." Both machines were named after legendary Hawaiian sumo wrestlers, but most Web surfers accepted these names as the locations for the "right stuff" when it came to finding things on the Internet.
Yang and Filo got their big break in early 1995 when Marc Andreessen, an original architect of the Mosaic Web browser at NCSA, and a co-founder of Netscape Communications, invited the two to house their files on some larger computers at Netscape. As a result, Stanford's computer network usage plummeted radically, and everybody 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." We think it's a mandatory stop on any journey of information search on the Web, simply because of all the great references and links that Yahoo! can provide.