the name "Yahoo" given to the internert search engine. (original) (raw)

Hello lupine

I'm so glad you asked this question, as it's once or twice crossed my mind but I've never actually got round to looking for an answer until now.

It seems there is a link of sorts with Swift's yahoos, although the name wasn't inspired by actually reading "Gulliver's Travels" itself, but came from the dictionary explanation of "yahoo".

Yahoo! (the exclamation mark is part of the name!) was named by its founders David Filo and Jerry Yang who tired of calling it "David and Jerry's Guide" soon after its beginning in 1994. So they reached for a dictionary . . .

There are quite a few variations on the "How Yahoo! got its name" story as you'll see in the excerpts below. Let me start with a speech founder Jerry Yang made in 1997:

"We were at Stanford for about a year, and our website project at the time was known as David and Jerry's Guide to the World Wide Web. Had we turned that into a commercial effort, I'm sure we wouldn't have gotten any venture capital funding.

One night David said that he was sick and tired of having his name on this thing. We looked in the dictionary and chose Yahoo! because of, surprisingly, the literary roots. It's a group of very uncivilized and rude people from Gulliver's Travels. We were certainly uncivilized.

So we thought Yahoo! fitted well with what we were doing. It was irreverent, it was reflective of the "wild, wild West" nature of the Internet, and a lot of people found the name easy to remember, which we thought was probably good. "

Speech by Jerry Yang - July 29, 1997 http://www.commonwealthclub.org/97-02yang-speech.html

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Next two excerpts from the Yahoo! site:

"The name Yahoo! is supposed to stand for "Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle," but Filo and Yang insist they selected the name because they considered themselves "yahoos", characters from Swift's Gulliver's Travels who were rude and uncivilised." http://uk.jobs.yahoo.net/yahoo_life_history.asp

"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: "rude, unsophisticated, uncouth."

The History of Yahoo http://docs.yahoo.com/info/misc/history.html

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"Jerry Yang and David Filo originally created the Internet portal as a Stanford University thesis project in 1994, calling it "David and Jerry's Guide to the World Wide Web."

Not satisfied with the clunky title, they thumbed through the dictionary for words that began with "ya," the universal computing acronym for "yet another." Filo stumbled upon "Yahoo," fondly remembering that his father used to call him "Little Yahoo" as a boy. They liked the name and rigged a more complete acronym: "Yet another hierarchical, officious oracle."

"They didn't go to a naming company," said Yahoo spokeswoman Diane Hunt. "They just went through Webster's dictionary."

For the record, the standard definition of yahoo is "a member of a race of brutes in Swift's Gulliver's Travels who have the form and all the vices of humans." The secondary definition is decidedly unprofessional: "a boorish, crass, or stupid person." http://www.naming.com/assets/news/CNET.html

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"At that time [...] it was popular in the computer industry to name products beginning with the wording, “Yet Another…”, for example, he says, there was a Unix software program called YACC (Yet Another Computer Compiler). Accordingly, Filo and Jerry decided to look for a suitable acronym starting with the letters ‘YA...’ and hit upon the word YAHOO for Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle. Filo and Jerry also liked the word ‘yahoo’ because it is in common parlance as an exclamation of joy (such as one might utter on finding a sought-for site on the Web) and had the dictionary definition of an uncouth or crude person as derived from Jonathon [sic] Swift’s novel Gulliver’s Travels." http://www.ipaustralia.gov.au/pdfs/trademarks/hearings/709752.pdf

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"Originally it was called "Jerry and David's guide to the World Wide Web", but after randomly scanning pages in a dictionary for a smarter sounding name, they came up with Yahoo. Yahoo is actually an acronym for "Yet another Hierarchical Officious Oracle". The acronym represents the fact that Yahoo seeks to be a directory or hierarchy that serves as an oracle to the modern day office dweller who is officious." http://www.akamarketing.com/yahoo-feature1.html acronym

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"When Gulliver came across that race of brutes known as Yahoos during his travels to fantastic lands, who could have guessed that one day that name would be worth $200 billion on Wall Street? Coined by Jonathan Swift in his masterly 1726 satire “Gulliver’s Travels,” the word has come a long way in its nearly 300—years to becoming one of the best-known Internet addresses in the world.

Picked in 1994 by David Filo and Jerry Yang for their newly incubated brainchild, Yahoo! according to the Yahoo! Web site, Filo and Yang chose it because they liked what the word represented—someone uncouth and unsophisticated. However, they later explained that the name was an acronym for “Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle.” One has to wonder whether their company would have been as successful if it had been named, say, Acme Internet Solutions." http://www.seniornet.org/php/default.php?PageID=6862

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"Dear Word Detective: A friend of mine told me that "Yahoo," the name of the web directory, actually means the same thing as "bozo." Is this true? Why would they name their web site after a word that means "idiot"? [...]

Hard to say. At first I suspected that the name "Yahoo" might be a subtle putdown of the site's users (as in "you'd have to be a yahoo to need us") until I realized that no one would be crazy enough to try to beat Microsoft at the customer humiliation game. The story I heard when Yahoo! (the exclamation point is part of their trademark) started up way back in 1994 was that the name stood for Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle. But the Yahoo! web page now says that the name was chosen because the site's two founders, David Filo and Jerry Yang, "considered themselves yahoos." If that's true, they may be the world's richest yahoos." http://www.word-detective.com/122099.html

I hope this answers your question, but please just ask if I can help clarify anything.

Best Wishes - Leli

Search started with:

Yahoo began

then: Yahoo began 1994

then: yahoo filo OR yang gulliver's OR swift's ://www.google.co.uk/search?q=cache:r5NkoCJAexgJ:svdaily.com/yahoo.html+yahoo+filo+OR+yang++~gulliver+OR+swift%27s&hl=en&start=9&ie=UTF-8