Yahoo! was founded in January 1994 by Jerry Yang and David Filo, who were graduate students at Stanford University 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!". The word "YAHOO" is a backronym for "Yet Another Hierarchically Organized Oracle" or "Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle." The “yahoo.com” domain was created on January 18, 1995. Yahoo! grew rapidly through 1990–1999 and diversified into a web portal, followed by numerous high-profile acquisitions. The company's stock price rose rapidly during the dot-com bubble and closed at an all-time high of US$118.75 in 2000. However, after the dot-com bubble burst, it reached an all-time low of $8.11 in 2001. Yahoo! formally rejected an acquisition bid from the Microsoft Corporation in 2008. In early 2012, Yahoo laid off 2,000 employees (14 percent of the workforce). This was the largest layoff in Yahoo!'s history. Carol Bartz replaced co-founder Yang as chief executive officer in January 2009, but was fired by the board of directors in September 2011. Tim Morse was appointed as interim CEO following Bartz's departure. 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. Mayer resigned as CEO of Yahoo in 2017, when it sold to Verizon for $4.48 billion, following Yahoo's disclosure of security breaches. Guru Gowrappan was CEO of Yahoo from 2018 to 2021. Jim Lanzone is the current CEO of Yahoo, appointed September 2021.
Early history (1994–1996) Jerry Yang and David Filo, who were electrical engineering graduates at Stanford University, founded "Jerry and David's Guide to the World Wide Web" in January 1994. When the site was renamed to "Yahoo!" in March 1994, Yang and Filo said that "Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle" was a suitable backronym 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.
The “yahoo.com” domain was created in January 1995, although 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! was incorporated. Yang and Filo sought the advice of entrepreneur Randy Adams for a recommendation of a venture capital firm, and Adams introduced them to Michael Moritz. On April 5, 1995, Michael Moritz of Sequoia Capital provided Yahoo! with two rounds of venture capital, raising approximately $3 million. In November 1995, Masayoshi Son initially investmented $2 million, but 4 months later this was expanded to $105 million for a 33% stake. The Yahoo! commercial website, including advertisements and news feeds from Reuters, launched in August 1995. That same month, Tim Koogle became the company's CEO. 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. It closed at US$33.00 – up 270 percent from the IPO price — after peaking at $43.00 for the day. The company's shares traded on Nasdaq under the ticker symbol YHOO. In September 1996, Yahoo! UK was launched. 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. 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.
Growth (1997–1999) In the late 1990s, Yahoo!, MSN, Lycos, Excite, and other web portals were growing rapidly. Web portal providers moved to acquire companies to expand their range of services, generally with the goal of increasing the time each user stays within the portal. The company invested in Singapore in January 1997, for the creation of the Singapore ONE network. The goal was to create a version of its search engine for the Asian market. On October 8, 1997, Yahoo! acquired online communications company Four11 for about $94 million in stock. Together with the ymail.com domain name, Four11's Rocketmail is incorporated into Yahoo! Mail the following June. That same month, Yahoo! acquired Viaweb, co-founded by Paul Graham, for $49 million, turning it into Yahoo! Store. The company also acquired ClassicGames.com and re-branded it Yahoo! Games. Yahoo acquired direct marketing company Yoyodyne Entertainment, Inc. in October 1998. In January 1999, Yahoo! acquired web hosting provider GeoCities, followed by Broadcast.com in April 1999. It acquired Pager, an instant messaging service that was renamed Yahoo! Messenger a year later. When acquiring companies, Yahoo! often changed the 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.
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