Yahoo!: The web service provider that derived its name from Gulliver’s Travels 

Apart from Google and Microsoft, what’s the other web service provider that is popular worldwide? Well, it’s a no-brainer. The answer is Yahoo! You know Yahoo! from one or more of its following services: search engine (Yahoo Search), email provider (yahoo.com), media provider (Yahoo News, Yahoo Finance, Yahoo Sports etc.) and the growing advertising platform Yahoo! Native. Ever wondered what’s the story behind the name Yahoo!? How did it all begin? Come, let us find out, together. 

Jerry and David’s guide to the World Wide Web 
The year was 1994 when friends Jerry Yang (a Taiwanese-American) and David Filo (American) were fresh out of college, having just graduated with a degree in electrical engineering from the Stanford University, US. Not impressed with the jobs they were getting, the duo decided to chart their own career paths.  

Using their programming and software developing skills, they came up with a web browser and called it “Jerry and David’s guide to the World Wide Web.” This website was the first of its kind. Why? Instead of having the usual and random searchable index of web pages, it was designed in the form of a hierarchical web directory that, revealed a catalogue of websites as and when a topic was searched. However, the best part about it was the fact that this browser wasn’t computer-automated, but human-edited. So, anyone could go and add their preferred websites, much like people go on Wikipedia and update information on a topic.  

Renamed as Yahoo!  
Within 3 months of its launch, Jerry and David’s guide to the World Wide Web was renamed as Yahoo!. The company officially stated that ‘yahoo’ was the backronym for “Yet Another Hierarchically Organised/ Officious Oracle.” While ‘hierarchical’ referred to its sub-categorically arranged database, ‘oracle’ was meant to be ‘a source of truth or wisdom’. As for ‘officious’, it was far from its original meaning and referred to the Yahoo! workers who often used their own database for work and beyond, with greater emphasis on the latter.  

While the public accepted this theory, later on, the founders during an interview revealed the real reason behind the name Yahoo! Any guesses? If you thought about Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels and the fictional race called Yahoo, you deserve a prize!  

Turns out, Swift had described the tribe as “rude, unsophisticated and uncouth” something that Yang and Filo could very well relate to. After all, they were both from the state of Louisiana wherein ‘yahoo’ was a common slang used by college goers to refer to themselves and similar other rural and unpolished Southerners. Looks like the founders of Yahoo! Couldn’t get over their roots! As far as the exclamation is concerned, it was simply meant for emphasis and nothing more.