The changing face of the Yahoo! homepage, 1996-2006

1996

Image: web.archive.org

Verizon’s $4.83 billion acquisition of Yahoo’s core business, announced today, marks the end of Yahoo’s 22-year run as an independent company.

In January 1994, Stanford University graduate students Jerry Yang and David Filo created a hierarchically-organized directory of websites imaginatively called “Jerry and David’s Guide to the World Wide Web.”

They renamed the site to Yahoo in April, taking the name from the race of rude, coarse and unpleasant beings in Jonathan Swift’s novel Gulliver’s Travels, though they also came up with a way for it to serve as an acronym — “Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle.” Read more...