|
Yahoo.com
Reference:
http://www.movieprop.com/internet/history.htm
Yahoo's roots go back to the very roots of the Internet itself.
In the early days Yahoo was just a word, just a name. Yahoo is an
abbreviation in fact for Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle.
The acronym represents the fact that Yahoo seeks to be a directory
or hierarchy that serves as an oracle or knowledge giver to the
modern day office dweller who is officious. The source of the silly
exclamation point at the end of Yahoo! is anyone's guess. Yahoo
was originally started by just two men; David Filo, and Jerry Yang
while attending Stanford University. Originally it was just basically
a project to keep favorite bookmarks catalogued as at the time in
94 or so as the only means to find things on the internet was spider
based engines such as altavista. As Yahoo grew, the strains on a
university's resources became more and more extreme. Yahoo basically
moved in and set up shop in Netscape facilities in 1995. In the
days before browser wars Netscape was a very large portal in its
own right. and had vast technical resources.
As Yahoo grew as a directory people would bookmark it and link to
this one of their favorite sites. Yahoo would not be where it is
today at all if it were not for all of the sites that linked to
it early on. The link, even before yahoo served as the lifeblood
of the internet and the means by which people could endorse their
favorite sites. Yahoo basically just took this to a whole new level.
By linking to so many sites in categories many sites in return linked
to them. Yahoo received an enormous amount of television and other
media attention from 94 to 97 or so and became the defacto spokesman
for the internet world.
Yahoo purchased geocities, and free e-mail provider rocketmail.com
from their parent companies. This was so that Yahoo could provide
free webpage add e-mail services to its visitors. Yahoo also acquired
Webring.com by acquring their parent company. Webring was a company
with roots similar to Yahoo that grew as a means for individuals
to organize data selectively by subject. When a webring on a given
topic became too big or unfocused then another one could be formed
with membership determined by the knowledge of the founder of the
ring. This was a serious yahoo threat and that is partly why they
were acquired.
Yahoo
proceeded to create things that the general public would come back
to see. Free e-mail would force people to come back daily to check
their e-mail. Free webhosting via geocities would not only increase
Yahoo's reach for advertisers but it also would make it so in effect
people collectively would be coming to Yahoo to find their own sites
and Yahoo would make money coming to their flagship site and as
people left for their favorite geocities pages. As free e-mail and
webpage services grew in the late 90's the market became common
everywhere.
All of these changes also have negated one factor, that the internet
has grown, but Yahoo's editorial surfing staff has not grown all
that much. Yahoo's core supporters in the beginning were webmasters
who gave Yahoo the grass roots support and help necessary for a
small force of two to transfrom itself into the world's leading
on-line entity. Submissions for new sites to their directory have
risen astronomically and if Yahoo is not careful then another upstart
will gain grass roots support and mount a guerilla warfare campaign
against them with the help of millions of webmasters.
|