Yahoo Little Known And Unknown Facts

What started off as a random idea between two friends, has now become one of the most popularly used portals the world over. While most of us know Yahoo! to be a search engine and email base provider, there are quite a few facts most of us do not know about this platform. To make your day fun and educational, here are some totally random facts about Yahoo!

1. The name 

Stanford student’s Jerry Yang and David Filo first started Yahoo! in February of 1994 to keep track of their own online interests. They named their project “Jerry’s Guide to the World Wide Web.” The site was a directory of other websites, organized in a hierarchy, as opposed to a searchable index of pages. 

2. Copyright issues 

The official name of Yahoo came to be in March, 1994. An acronym for Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle, the yahoo.com domain was brought on 18 January, 1995. The term “hierarchical” described how the Yahoo database was arranged in layers of subcategories. The term “oracle” was intended to mean “source of truth and wisdom” and the term “officious”, rather than being related to the word’s normal meaning, described the many office workers who would use the Yahoo database while surfing from work. Ironically, the exclamation was added later because an already existing barbecue sauce company had copyrights on the name!

3. The largest acquisition 

One of Yahoo’s highest priced acquisitions was when it bought Broadcast.com for a cool $ 5.7 billion! Incidentally, the least they paid was when they bought Net Controls for slightly over $1 million in 1997.

4. The big ten! 

When Yahoo turned ten in March 2005, it celebrated by giving away free Baskin Robbins coupons to all its users! Lucky number 10 not just for them, but for everyone!

5. Japan

Rumour has it, Yahoo! was the most widely used portal not in the United States, but in Japan! On a regular basis, Yahoo! has around 96% visitors, with about 34% of them being from Japan. Talk about cool things to know.

Just before Yahoo! was acquired in the year 2015, it had around 13,000 employees on its roster along with 8 CEOS and more than 50 companies under its belt. Despite other search engines gaining popularity over the years, it still remains favoured and trusted among all its competitors.