Yahoo! was the web directory Jerry Yang and David Filo started in 1994.
As Stanford electrical-engineering graduate students, Yang and Filo created “Jerry and David’s Guide to the World Wide Web” in January 1994. It was a human-edited directory: websites were collected and organized into subject categories and subcategories rather than discovered automatically by crawling the entire Web.
The project became known as Yahoo! in 1994, and its hierarchical directory quickly attracted a large audience. The name was later associated with the backronym “Yet Another Hierarchically Organized Oracle,” although Yang and Filo also cited the ordinary meaning of “yahoo” from Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels. The yahoo.com domain was registered in January 1995, and the company was incorporated that March.
Yahoo! later added search functionality, becoming both a directory and a search portal. That history distinguishes it from Infoseek, Lycos, and Excite, which were associated with search-engine development. Yahoo’s original directory was eventually closed in 2014, after search engines had largely replaced manually curated web indexes.