Yahoo!

Yahoo! (spelled with the exclamation point) is a popular Internet portal and category-based search engine (web directory): http://www.yahoo.com/. Founded by David Filo[?] and Jerry Yang in April 1995.

The Web site started out as "Jerry's Guide to the World Wide Web" but eventually received a new moniker with the help of a dictionary. 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." Yahoo! itself first resided on Yang's student workstation, "Akebono," while the software was lodged on Filo's computer, "Konishiki" - both named after legendary sumo wrestlers. Source: http://docs.yahoo.com/info/misc/history.html

The "yet another" phrasing goes back at least to the Unix utility yacc, whose name is an acronym for "yet another compiler compiler".

As Yahoo!'s popularity increased, so did the range of features it offered, making it a kind of one-stop shop for all the popular activities of the Internet. These included a web-based e-mail service, an instant messaging client, various news and information portals, and even online shopping and auction facilities. Yahoo! also acquired the popular Geocities[?] free web-hosting service, and various competing mailing list providers which were merged under the name Yahoo! Groups[?].

However, some users became fed up with the resultant cluttered look of the site, and with the amount of advertising which was necessary to pay for these services. This added to the appeal of Google, which offered a fast, powerful, no-nonsense search system, and has now replaced Yahoo! as many people's primary search. Interestingly, Yahoo!'s pure database (as opposed to directory) search facilities are now powered by Google.