Yahoo! A Guide to Everything

Yahoo! A guide to everything

In the Web is difficult to find exactly what you want. Yahoo! is one of the most popular sites on the Web, with millions of visitors every day, because it uses a different way of searching the Internet.

Yahoo! employs people to ‘surf’ the Web. The principle behind the system is that any site can be fitted into one of fourteen categories. The fourteen categories are only the surface of Yahoo! Each of them contains many other, smaller categories which each contain even smaller categories.

How Yahoo! was created…

Yahoo!’s creators were Jerry Yang and Dave Filo. They met at Stanford University. They were a great team. Dave is a brilliant engineer, Jerry is a brilliant talker.

They spent hours on the Internet and their university work began to suffer.

Dave and Jerry both began to make lists of their favourite Web sites. The result was Jerry’s Guide to the World Wide Web.

There were so many sites that Dave and Jerry had to organise the list. They broke it into categories, and when the categories became too big, they broke them into smaller categories.

Soon, hundreds of people were viewing Jerry’s Guide every day. Then they began to ask people to suggest good Web sites.

After a few weeks, Jerry decided to change the name of the site to David and Jerry’s Guide to the World Wide Web.

Later, they have to choose a name. They started with Y-A, because lots of their favourite computer programs were ‘Ya-something’. They sat down with a dictionary and starting looking. Finally, they decided on ‘Yahoo!’, because they just liked the sound of it.

A bit of history…

In 1994 the traffic was so heavy and there was not much time to eat or sleep. So, Dave and Jerry began to think that there must be a way to turn all this traffic into business.

A big Internet company called AOL was interested in buying Yahoo! AOL made Dave and Jerry an offer that would make them very rich, very quickly. They thought hard about the offer, but they finally refused it.

April 1995: they borrowed $4 million to turn Yahoo! into a proper business. They used that money to turn Yahoo! into a proper company. They began to hire managers and professional surfers. Tim Koogle was hire to be the chief manager (his job was to decide how to make money from this amazingly popular-but free-service.

August 1995: Yahoo! began to sell space on pages. Yahoo! introduced some changes like news service. Later they made a deal with Reuters (world’s largest news organization). This was Yahoo!’s first step to becoming a destination as well as a guide that send people to other sites.

Soon services like weather, share prices and travel news were added. Yahoo! was becoming the first place to look for information, news or fun.

Yahoo! was serving 6 million pages a day and eighty companies were paying for advertising on the site. Finally on March 1996, Yahoo! went public.   

You can see the presentation following the link:  http://e-duc.com.ar/lcb/mod/data/view.php?d=8&rid=81