Yahoo! (spelled with the exclamation point) is a popular Internet portal and Web directory. It was founded by Stanford graduates David Filo and Jerry Yang in April 1995. Yahoo! is headquartered in Sunnyvale, California.
The Web site started out as "Jerry's Guide to the World Wide Web" but eventually received a new moniker with the help of a dictionary. The name Yahoo! is an 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, as in Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift: "rude, unsophisticated, uncouth." Yahoo! itself first resided on Yang's student workstation, "Akebono," while the software was lodged on Filo's computer, "Konishiki"—both named after legendary sumo wrestlers.
The "yet another" phrasing goes back at least to the Unix utility yacc, whose name is an acronym for "yet another compiler compiler".
As Yahoo!'s popularity has increased, so has the range of features it offers, making it a kind of one-stop shop for all the popular activities of the Internet. These now include: a web-based e-mail service, an instant messaging client, a very popular mailing list service (Yahoo! Groups), online gaming and chat, various news and information portals, online shopping and auction facilities, and an online payment system (similar to PayPal) called Yahoo! Paydirect. Many of these are based at least in part on previously independent services, which Yahoo! has acquired - such as the popular Geocities free web-hosting service, Rocketmail, and various competing mailing list providers such as eGroups.
Yahoo! has now begun making partnerships with telecommunications and Internet providers - such as BT in the UK - to create content-rich broadband services to rival those offered by AOL.