A Yahoo? Welcome to one of the most popular destinations on the Web. Like many whimsically named creations of the Internet, Yahoo is an acronym that sounds retrofitted – it stands for ““Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle.’’ Whatever that means, Yahoo is basically a catalog of other Web home pages organized by subject, a kind of Yellow Pages for the Internet. Click on ““Entertainment,’’ and Yahoo will retrieve headings from ““Automobiles’’ to ““Comics’’ to ““Paranormal Phenomena.’’ Click again, and the list narrows down one more level. Yahoo’s inventory of more than 30,000 entries doesn’t winnow the unwieldy Web down to a pamphlet – but it’s better than searching alone.
The brainchild of two Stanford University electrical-engineering Ph.D. students – David Filo and Jerry Yang – Yahoo began about a year ago as their personal list of favorite Web sites. ““For me the Internet was really unfriendly. It was laborious,’’ says Yang, who dislikes the text-based interface that governs most of the Internet. The Web ushered in graphics and intuitive, point-and-click navigation that opened the Internet’s doors to many who had fearfully stayed away.
Yahoo started on two computers in Filo and Yang’s cramped, shared office in a trailer on campus. Today Filo estimates that about 200,000 people modem in daily. But despite its popularity, until recently Yahoo’s future was up in the air: it had a home at Stanford only as long as Filo and Yang remained students. But Marc Andreessen, one of the creators of NCSA Mosaic and cofounder of Netscape Communications Corp., came to the rescue. He invited the pair to set up shop at his Mountain View, Calif., headquarters. Now Yahoo can be accessed from the Netscape browser’s main menu.
What began as a hobby now demands at least eight hours a day from Filo and Yang, who are constantly adding new sites, making improvements and answering fan e-mail. For now, their joint computer research project is on the back burner. The world out there, it seems, will have to wait.
