Initially the name was “Jerry’s Guide to the World Wide Web” but was renamed as Yahoo in April 1994. “Jerry’s Guide to the World Wide Web” provided a directory to other sites, and recognized their site by categories such as business education, entertainment, etc., all with dozens of other subcategories.
Seeking to emphasize their easy going, anti-bureaucratic style, they name their company Yahoo! Yahoo! is short for "Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle."
As Yahoo!’s popularity, grew, Yang and Filo dropped out of Stanford to devote themselves full-time to their venture. In April 1995, Sequoia Capital agreed to fund Yahoo! with an initial investment of nearly $2 million. Yahoo! launched a highly-successful IPO in April 1996 with a total of 49 employees.
On 8 March 1997, Yahoo! acquired online communications company Four11. Four11's webmail service, Rocketmail, became Yahoo! Mail. In December 2002, Yahoo! acquired Inktomi. Today, Yahoo! Inc. is a leading global Internet communications, commerce and media company that offers a comprehensive branded network of services to more than 345 million individuals each month worldwide.
Yahoo! makes money mostly through advertising, and its advertising base includes many of the world’s blue chip companies.
The company also provides online business and enterprise services designed to enhance the productivity and Web presence of Yahoo!'s clients. According to Web traffic analysis companies, the domain yahoo.com attracted at least 1.575 billion visitors annually by 2008.
By the February 2015, it had dropped to the third largest search engine in the United States, handling 12.8 percent of the search queries. Google had 64.5 percent of the searches and Bing, 19.8 percent.
History of search engine of Yahoo!
