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Yahoo

THE HISTORY OF YAHOO

In 1994 Yahoo was founded by two PHD students of electrical engineering at Stanford University David Filo and Jerry Young. They were co-founders of Yahoo. While at Stanford they both were spending too much time on the search of their favorite links URL, and web addresses to find the specific site they wanted. So to reduce their search time, Filo and David   had decided to break up their list of websites into categories. When the categories became too full, they developed subcategories…and the core concept behind Yahoo was born.   In 1994 Filo and David Published their first website directory “ Jerry Guide to the World Wide Web” which was later renamed as “Yahoo” They selected the name because they liked the Yahoo general definition, “ rude, unsophisticated, uncouth”. Yahoo is the short for “Yet another hierarchical officious oracle”.   Yahoo became famous as the first search engine of 1990’s and its internet directory was first of its kind to be up and running.   By 1994, hundred of thousand of users were visiting Yahoo, it became the primary search portal. Yahoo domain was created on   January 18, 1995. Yang and Filo realized their website had massive business potential and on March 1st, 1995, Yahoo was incorporated.
Yahoo first allowed companies to advertise their products on the site for the fee. Later on Filo and Yang paid for the sophisticated IT infrastructure to support their portal’s growth.   They first struck a deal with Sequoia Capital for nearly $2 million.   To develop Yahoo first business model Tim Koogle was hired as the first CEO of Yahoo and Jeffery Mallett as the first COO. In 1996, Yahoo raised   $338 million by selling 2.6 million shares at $13 each.

Yahoo advertising fuction was built up rapidly, hundreds of companies were signed up initially to advertise their products on its portal. Hundreds of IT software engineers were hired.   By 1996, Yahoo listed over 200,000 websites in over 20,000 different categories.
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