The history of Yahoo

Yahoo!, much like Google was born out of student projects, this time those of David Filo and Jerry Yang, Electrical Engineering students at that popular Search Engine birth place, Stanford University. Yahoo! Is firmly in second place to Google in the UK search engine market, but actively challenges Google for first place in the US market. However, Yahoo! is a significant target for Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) and Search Engine Marketing activity in the UK.

In 1994 both David and Jerry faced the challenge of tracking their own personal Internet interests; the answer was a directory of sites and information. This list soon became long and clumsy and they split it into categories. Categories became long and clumsy and they introduced subcategories. This method of categorising sites and site content was the founding principal of Yahoo!

Yahoo! didn´t start life with the name we know today. It was born: ‘Jerry and David´s Guide to the World Wide Web´. Their collective intellect soon realised something a little catchier and memorable was needed, and the dictionary was consulted. Yahoo, an acronym for ‘Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle´, was chosen with the justification that it was the broader dictionary definition of ‘unsophisticated, uncouth, rude´ that attracted them. Yahoo! began life on Jerry´s computer known as ‘Akebono´ with David´s computer known as ‘Konishiki´ housing the software. Akebono and Konishiki are both Hawaiian sumo fighters and Akebono reached the level of Yokozuma (grand champion) in 1993, the first non-Japanese grand champion ever. Konishiki narrowly missed achieving Oseki (champion) level in 1992.

Yahoo!, soon spread outside the confines of the Stanford campus and out into the wider Internet community by word of mouth. Before long, hundreds of people where accessing the directory, creating a loyal following. Yahoo! achieved over 100,000 unique users by the end of 1994.

Realising the potential opportunity that the two had created they soon went to Silicon Valley looking for venture capital. In 1995 they met with Sequoia Capital that had invested in Apple Computer, Atari, Cisco and Oracle, and with $2 million on offer Yahoo!, had a future. Sequoia went on to help fund Google´s expansion. Interestingly, one of their first recruits was a certain Mr. Koogle a Stanford University Alumni, he ultimately became CEO.

1996 saw Yahoo! have its IPO and in 1998 it went on to acquire Viaweb, which became Yahoo! Stores, allowing users to set up and manage their own online stores within the Yahoo! infrastructure. In 1999 Yahoo! acquired the direct marketing company Yoyodyne Entertainment Inc., followed shortly by Geocities and Broadcast.com. Meanwhile, shares in Yahoo! hit an all time high of $475.00 each and Yahoo! Japan became the first share to trade at over 100,000,000 Yen.

2000 was marked by a short closure of the service through a denial of service attack. Hackers where blamed and the share price rose, unlike the result of a similar incident at eBay when such a failure was blamed on a technical fault. eGroups was acquired and Yahoo!, continued to grow. It formed an alliance with Google to deliver Google results within the Yahoo! web site.

During 2001 the acquisitions continued with Yahoo buying HotJobs despite the share price falling to an all-time low of $8.11 a share. The bubble had burst for Yahoo! investors! During 2002 and 2003 Yahoo! regained its momentum forming a number of alliances and partnerships, not least with BT Openworld. Yahoo! went on to acquire the search engine Inktomi as well as Overture Services Inc. Overture was a early innovator and provider of pay-per-click (PPC) technology and led to the founding of many of today´s Search Engine Marketing companies. Today Yahoo! PPC service is called YSM or Yahoo! Search Marketing.

2004 saw Yahoo! Labs being founded to develop technologies and services for Yahoo! They dropped Google powered results and launched their own crawler, algorithm and index. Yahoo! became a search engine in its own right, and it still maintained its own directory, unlike Google that use the DMOZ directory. Yahoo! soon went on to announce paid inclusion where web site owners could circumnavigate the crawler for a fee and get their pages and content into the Yahoo! index. The Search Engine Marketing community was immediately critical of this move - it rendered their Search Engine Optimisation activities a waste of money! Yahoo also went on to acquire the shopping site Kelkoo and the email provider Oddpost.com.

2005 saw the launch of both Yahoo!´s video search and Yahoo! Music, as well as the establishment of a European Headquarters based in Dublin. The launch of an API and developer network and the celebration of its 10th year soon followed. It offered free Baskin Robbins ice cream vouchers for Baskin Robbins to its users - a fat lot of good that was for many! Soon after it went on the acquisition trail again and bought Flickr, VoIP provider DialPad Communications, widget engine Konfabulator, social event calendar Upcoming.org, Whereonearth.com and del.icio.us. If that was not enough it bought a stake in Alibaba.com that took over the running of Yahoo! China. Despite the burden of acquisitions Yahoo! also launched its blogging and social networking service Yahoo! 360, PhotoMail, a DSL service with its partner Verizon and formed a partnership to provide services on the Tivo platform.

A dark moment for Yahoo! in 2005 came with its decision to supply information to The People´s Republic of China that then imprisoned Shi Tao for 10 years.

2006 has started much as 2005 left off with Yahoo! back on the acquisition front buying webjay.org, launching a PHP developer network and Yahoo! Tech, a technology goods consumer information site. The rate of growth and change in Search never seems to slow - we´ll keep you updated as events unfold for Yahoo!

We´ll regularly revisit this page and make further entries as the future of one of foremost Search Brands unfolds.

www.yahoo.com and www.yahoo.co.uk