YAHOO IS ANOTHER OF THE CORPORATE ICONS THAT WILL DRAMATICALLY SHAPE THE INTERNET IN THIS CENTURY

YAHOO is a colossus that began a little more than a dozen years ago. Like many of today’s electronic and internet giants, it was begun by college students as fun projects. They rank with Dell, Gates, and others who were born in the 50’s and 60’s and have changed the face of communications in the world. Yahoo! began as a student hobby and evolved into a global brand that has changed the way people communicate with each other, find and access information and purchase things. The two founders of Yahoo!, David Filo and Jerry Yang, Ph.D. candidates in Electrical Engineering at Stanford University, initiated their guide in a campus trailer in 1994 as a way to keep track of their personal interests on the Internet.

Their Web site started out as "Jerry and David's Guide to the World Wide Web," but soon received a new name with the help of their handy dictionary and a little tongue in cheek. The name Yahoo! is their acronym for "Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle," but Filo and Yang insist they selected the name because they liked the general definition of a yahoo: "rude, unsophisticated, uncouth." . Before long, hundreds of people were accessing their guide from well beyond the Stanford trailer. Word spread through friends to quickly become a significant and loyal audience in the closely-knit and burgeoning Internet community. .

Today, Yahoo! Inc. is a leading global Internet communications, commerce and media company in dozens of countries that offers a comprehensive branded network of services to more than 345 million individuals each month worldwide. As the first online navigational guide to the Web, www.yahoo.com is the leading guide in terms of traffic, advertising, household and business user reach. Yahoo! is the No. 1 Internet brand globally and reaches the largest audience worldwide. Yahoo receives the unimaginable pages-viewed daily of 3.4 billion. And if Yahoo users joined hands in a chain they would stretch around the world 11 times.  They can only grow and prosper to benefit us all. Way to go Jerry and David!