Yahoo! UK & Ireland

From Yahoo! to Yahoo! UK & Ireland

Like many other aspects of the digital age, Yahoo! began as an idea, grew into a hobby and ended up as a full-time passion and business. That business is all about making the Internet a nicer place to be by making the task of finding things much easier. It has been so successful that millions of people now regularly use Yahoo! to find their way around the Web.

With Yahoo! UK & Ireland, Yahoo! extends a global reach that includes Yahoo! Japan, Yahoo! China, Yahoo! France, Yahoo! Germany and many more!

It's a far cry from the company's humble beginnings. The two developers of Yahoo!, David Filo and Jerry Yang, Ph.D. candidates in Electrical Engineering at Stanford University, started their guide in April 1994 as a way to keep track of their personal interests on the Internet. Before long they found that their home-brewed lists were becoming too long and unwieldy. Gradually they began to spend more and more time on Yahoo!.

During 1994 they converted Yahoo! into a customised database designed to serve the needs of the thousands of users who began to use the service through the closely bound Internet community. They developed customised software to help them efficiently locate, identify and edit material stored on the Internet. The name Yahoo! is supposed to stand for "Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle" but Filo and Yang insist they selected the name because they considered themselves yahoos. Yahoo! itself first resided on Yang's student workstation, "akebono," while the search engine was lodged on Filo's computer, "konishiki." (These machines were named after legendary Hawaiian sumo wrestlers.)

In early 1995 Marc Andreessen, co-founder of Netscape Communications in Mountain View, California (and the developer of the two most popular Web-browsers) invited Filo and Yang to move their files over to larger computers housed at Netscape. As a result Stanford's computer network returned to normal, and both parties benefited. Today, Yahoo! contains organised information on tens of thousands of computers linked to the Web. The San Jose Mercury News recently noted that "Yahoo is closest in spirit to the work of Linnaeus, the 18th century botanist whose classification system organised the natural world."

The development of Yahoo! Europe, which incorporates separate search engines for Germany, France and the UK, follows the recent success of Yahoo! Japan and Canada. With teams based in each country, Yahoo! is better able to cater for the needs of Web users who want to search for information that emphasises their national heritage.

The result is the most comprehensive list of sites relevant to UK and Irish people available anywhere on the Web. Linnaeus and his British contemporaries would be proud!