1. Yahoo was first started by Jerry Yang and David Filo in February, 1994. It did not start as a search engine. In fact, they started it to keep track of their own interests online. Later it turned into a simple catalog which contained the site links in the Internet.
2. From there, it developed into a web directory, where only web page information are collated and divided into subcategories. In autumn 1994 the catalog contained more than 1 million of requests and about 100.000 thousand of users. Yahoo began as a project created by two individuals and has grown to employ estimated 13,000 full time individuals.
3. The project was initially named as Jerry’s Guide to the World Wide Web. In April the name of Jerry’s Guide to the World Wide Web was changed to Yahoo. Yahoo is actually an acronym for Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle.
4. At that time "Yahoo" was already trademarked by a company that produced barbecue sauce, knives and human propelled watercraft. For this reason Yang and Filo added the exclamation point to the end of Yahoo!
5. Yahoo currently owns and operates over fifty different web properties, most of which are sites that gained popularity before being acquired by Yahoo. Some examples include Geocities, Yahoo! Games, Del.icio.us, Flickr, and Upcoming.org. Most of these acquired companies are from the United States.
6. Yahoo’s email service, which they purchased from Four11, is still considered to be the most popular email program in the world. The company also bought such projects as HotJobs and Flicker which were later integrated to their own portal.
7. On November 30, 2008, Microsoft offered to buy Yahoo!'s search business for $20 billion. However, on July 29, 2009, a 10 year deal with Microsoft was done which gave microsoft full access to Yahoo!'s search for its search engine, Bing.
8. Yahoo used Google company technologies for the realization of their search system, but in February 2004 all the agreements with Google have been cancelled. However, after several years the company succeeded to become the leader in the sphere of the e-search.
9. The average Yahoo! Messenger chit-chat is 17 times longer than one on a cell phone. It would take 7,000 years for all the photos on Flickr to be developed. Yahoo! Groups has more members than the number of International Red Cross volunteers. And, it would take 50,000 planes to fly all of the Yahoo! Travel users on a group vacation.
10. Today, Yahoo takes the second place as for the popularity in the world among the search systems, and the first place as for the number of users registered on the Yahoo portal, which provides with a list of services, such as Yahoo Mail, Yahoo Games, Yahoo Music and so on.
