Yahoo Inc would consider a business alliance with Google Inc as one way to rebuff a $44.6 billion takeover proposal by Microsoft, a source familiar with Yahoo’s strategy said on Sunday.
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Yahoo Early history 1994-1996
In January 1994, Jerry Yang and David Filo were Stanford Electrical Engineering graduate students at Stanford University. They started a list of web pages in a campus trailer in February 1994, as a way to keep track of their personal interests on the Internet. The lists were published as a web site named “Jerry’s Guide to the World Wide Web”, and grew large enough to require categories and subcategories organized in a hierarchy. Before long they were spending more time on their home-brewed lists of favorite links than on their doctoral dissertations.
In April 1994, “Jerry’s Guide to the World Wide Web” was renamed “Yahoo”. Filo and Yang said they selected the name because they liked the word’s general definition, as in Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift: “rude, unsophisticated, uncouth.” The name can also be a backronym for “Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle”.[7] Its URL was akebono.stanford.edu/yahoo.[8]
By the end of 1994, Yahoo had already received one million hits. Yang and Filo realized their website had massive business potential, and on 1 March 1995, Yahoo was incorporated.[9] On April 5, 1995, Sequoia Capital provided Yahoo with two rounds of venture capital.[10] On 12 April 1996, Yahoo had its initial public offering, raising $33.8 million dollars, by selling 2.6 million shares at $13 each.
“Yahoo” had already been trademarked for barbecue sauce (and knives (by EBSCO Industries)). Therefore, in order to get the trademark, Yang and Filo added the exclamation mark to the name.[11]