1. Yahoo! was first started by two PhD candidates at Stanford - Jerry Yang and David Filo in February, 1994. Initially Yahoo! was created as a simple catalog which contained the site links in the Internet.
2. The project was initially named as Jerry’s Guide to the World Wide Web. In April the name was changed to Yahoo, which is an acronym for Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle.
3. Yang and Filo added the exclamation mark after Yahoo! because Yahoo was already trademarked by a company that produced barbecue sauce, knives and human propelled watercraft.
4. Yahoo currently owns and operates over fifty different web properties, most of which are sites that gained popularity before being acquired by Yahoo.
5. On November 30, 2008, Microsoft offered to buy Yahoo!'s search business for $20 billion. 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.
6. The owners of Yahoo considered buying Google before it went public. However, at the time Yahoo decided that a few billion dollars was too much to pay to buy out their competitor.
7. Yahoo’s email service, which they purchased from Four11, is still considered to be the most popular email program in the world.
8. Yahoo! has its divisions in different countries of the world. It opened its divisions: 1996 – Germany, 1997 – Sweden, 1998 – Italy and Spain, 1999 – China, 2000 – India and Canada.
9. Yahoo! has acquired more than 50 companies. Most of these acquired companies are from the United States.
10. Corporation bought such projects as HotJobs and Flicker and after that were integrated to their own portal.
11. In March of 2005 Yahoo celebrated it’s 10 year anniversary by giving away free Baskin Robins ice cream coupons to all of their users.
12. Yahoo began as a project created by two individuals and has grown to employ estimated 13,000 full time individuals.
13. Yahoo! Search BOSS is a service that allows developers to build search applications based on Yahoo!'s search technology.
14. Yahoo! Meme is a beta social service, similar to the popular social networking sites Twitter and Jaiku.
15. Yahoo! Next is an incubation ground for future Yahoo! technologies currently in their beta testing phase, similar to Google Labs.
