Jerry Yang and David Filo co-founded Yahoo! in 1994 as a directory of websites.
Yang and Filo were graduate students at Stanford University when they created a list of useful websites for their own browsing. They organized it into categories and called it “Jerry and David’s Guide to the World Wide Web.” The service quickly attracted outside users as the web expanded.
The name was shortened to Yahoo!, and the company was incorporated in 1995. Yahoo! became one of the early major internet portals, offering search, email, news, finance and other services. It is sometimes incorrectly described as beginning primarily as a search-engine company; its original defining feature was its human-curated directory.