History of Yahoo!

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See also: Timeline of Yahoo!

This article needs to be updated. Please update this article to reflect recent
events or newly available information. (May 2016)

Yahoo! was started at Stanford University. It was founded in January 1994 by Jerry
Yang and David Filo, who were Electrical Engineering graduate students when they created a
website named "Jerry and David's Guide to the World Wide Web". The Guide was a directory
of other websites, organized in a hierarchy, as opposed to a searchable index of pages. In April
1994, Jerry and David's Guide to the World Wide Web was renamed "Yahoo!".[1][2] The
yahoo.com domain was created on January 18, 1995.[3]
Yahoo! grew rapidly throughout the 1990s and diversified into a web portal, followed by
numerous high-profile acquisitions. The company's stock price skyrocketed during thedot-com
bubble and closed at an all-time high of US$118.75 in 2000;[4] however, after the dot-com
bubble burst, it reached an all-time low of US$8.11 in 2001.[5] Yahoo! formally rejected an
acquisition bid from the Microsoft Corporation in 2008.[6] In early 2012, the largest layoff in
Yahoo!'s history was completed and 2,000 employees (14 percent of the workforce) lost their
jobs.[7]
Carol Bartz replaced co-founder Jerry Yang as CEO in January 2009,[8] but was fired by the
board of directors in September 2011; Tim Morse was appointed as interim CEO following
Bartz's departure.[9] Former PayPal president Scott Thompson became CEO in January 2012
and after he resigned was replaced by Ross Levinsohn as the company's interim CEO on May
13, 2012. On July 16, former Google executive Marissa Mayer, became the CEO of the
company.[10]

Contents
[hide]

1Early history (19941996)

2Growth (19971999)
3Dot-com bubble (20002001)
4Post dot-com bubble (20022005)
5Yahoo! (20062008)
o 5.1Acquisition attempt by Microsoft
6Carol Bartz era (20092011)
7Scott Thompson period (2012)
o 7.1Employee layoffs
o 7.2Facebook patent lawsuit
o 7.3Reorganization
o 7.4Thompson's College degree controversy
o 7.5Thompson replaced by Ross Levinsohn (interim)
8Marissa Mayer era (2012present)
9References
10External links

Early history (19941996)[edit]

Upon the April 1994 renaming of Jerry and David's Guide to the World Wide Web to Yahoo!,
Yang and Filo said that "Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle" was a
suitablebackronym for this name, but they insisted they had selected the name because they
liked the word's general definition, as in Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift: "rude,
unsophisticated, uncouth." Its URL was akebono.stanford.edu/yahoo.

David Filo

Jerry Yang

While the yahoo.com domain was created in January 1995,[3] by the end of 1994 Yahoo! had
already received one million hits. Yang and Filo realized their website had massive business
potential, and on March 2, 1995, Yahoo! wasincorporated.[11] Yang and Filo sought out the
advice of serial entrepreneur Randy Adams for a recommendation of a venture capital firm and
Adams introduced them to Michael Moritz.[12] On April 5, 1995, Michael Moritz of Sequoia
Capital provided Yahoo! with two rounds of venture capital, raising approximately $3
million.[13][14] On April 12, 1996, Yahoo! had its initial public offering, raising $33.8 million by
selling 2.6 million shares at the opening bid of $13 each.
The word "Yahoo" had previously been trademarked for barbecue sauce, knives (by EBSCO
Industries) and human propelled watercraft (by Old Town Canoe Co.). Therefore, in order to
get control of the trademark, Yang and Filo added the exclamation mark to the
name.[15] However, the exclamation mark is often incorrectly omitted when referring to Yahoo!.
Srinija Srinivasan, an alumna of Stanford University, was hired as Yahoo!'s fifth employee as
"Ontological Yahoo!" to assist Yang and Filo with organizing the content on the internet.[16][17]
Yahoo! headquarters in Sunnyvale

Growth (19971999)[edit]
In the late 1990s, Yahoo!, MSN, Lycos, Excite and other web portals were growing
rapidly. Web portal providers rushed to acquire companies to expand their range of services,
generally with the goal of increasing the time each user stays within the portal.
On March 8, 1997, Yahoo! acquired online communications company Four11. Four11's
webmail service, Rocketmail, became Yahoo! Mail. Yahoo! also
acquired ClassicGames.com and turned it into Yahoo! Games. Yahoo! then acquired direct
marketing companyYoyodyne Entertainment, Inc. on October 12, 1998.[18] In January 1999,
Yahoo! acquired web hosting provider GeoCities. Another company Yahoo! took over
was eGroups, which became Yahoo! Groups in June 2000. On March 8, 1998, Yahoo!
launched Yahoo! Pager,[19] an instant messaging service that was renamed Yahoo!
Messenger a year later.
When acquiring companies, Yahoo! often changed the relevant terms of service. For example,
they claimed intellectual property rights for content on their servers, unlike the previous policies
of the companies they acquired. As a result, many of the acquisitions were controversial and
unpopular with users of the existing services.[citation needed]