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Yahoo! - technical definition

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A Web directory developed in the early 1990s by Stanford graduate students David Filo and Jerry Yang. Yahoo! has expanded into a full-featured Web portal, including a search engine, chat groups, instant messaging (IM), and e-mail. The word Yahoo was coined by Jonathan Swift in his book Gulliver's Travels (1726), referring to a race of foul, uncultivated, loutish, brutish creatures in the form of men. The term has since evolved to refer to a coarse, unrefined, unruly, crudely materialistic person. Filo and Yang reportedly selected the name because they considered themselves yahoos. See also endianess.

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(Yahoo! Inc., Sunnyvale, CA, www.yahoo.com) The largest and most comprehensive information portal on the Web. Along with Web search, news, sports and weather, Yahoo! offers e-mail, instant messaging, travel, auctions, classified ads, discussion groups, Web hosting and numerous other services.

It Began with Search
When it launched in 1995, Yahoo! was the first Web search site to gain worldwide attention. It distinguished itself in the early days because it created its indexes manually. Instead of sending out automated spiders that roamed the Web and indexed everything in sight, indexing specialists decided what categories a Web page fit in. As a result, Yahoo! called itself a "directory," rather than just a search engine. Today, Yahoo! also uses spiders because the Web has grown too large to handle entirely by hand.

A Student Hobby
In 1994, Stanford Ph.D candidates Jerry Yang and David Filo began indexing interesting Web sites as a hobby. "Jerry and David's Guide to the World Wide Web" turned into Yahoo!, meaning "Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle!" A very successful IPO followed in 1996, and within a few years, Yahoo! became a major global brand with offices around the world. See Yahoo! Store and Web search engines.