The History of Yahoo!
From Hobby to Internet Sensation
The Internet is an expansive web of sites on almost any topic you can think of. To help you navigate these sites and find the ones you want to visit, you probably use a search engine. When the World Wide Web had just begun, however, there wasn’t much to guide the average user unless you paid for an account with a company such as AOL or Microsoft Network.
But two bored Stanford students would change all of that in the Spring of 1994, stumbling upon what is now a popular Internet product company with over 650 million unique users every month. So how did a college hobby become the Fortune 500 company that is known today as Yahoo! (“Yahoo! Inc. Success Story”)?
Jerry’s Guide to the World Wide Web: 1994–1995
In 1994, an electrical engineering student named Jerry Yang shared a list of his favorite websites with his fellow engineering student, David Filo. Together, the two began spending their free time surfing the Web and compiling a bigger list of their favorite websites and including it on their own website, initially called Jerry’s Guide to the World Wide Web and later David and Jerry’s Guide to the World Wide Web. Their site featured links to sites they found interesting, separated into categories―and in a span of just six months it grew from a…
