As the spread of the Internet and the Web took off exponentially, its use as a social magnet grew with it. People – mostly students - began to create pages of links to other web pages that interested them, so that friends and colleagues could share them easily.

David Filo and Jerry Yang were two Ph.D. candidates at Stanford University who started their guide to web sites in a campus trailer in February 1994 to keep track of their personal interests. It wasn’t long before they spent more time on the list of web site links than on their doctoral dissertations. As the lists grew, they broke them into categories, then subcategories. At this point, the web site that started out as Jerry’s Guide to the World Wide Web was renamed Yahoo! with the help of a dictionary. While some say Yahoo! stands for Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle, Filo and Yang insist it was simply named after them – a couple of “yahoos” as the dictionary stated: “Rude, unsophisticated, uncouth.”

Word of Yahoo! spread quickly and in the fall of 1994, the site had its first million-hit day, representing almost 100,000 unique visitors.

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