Yahoo
More info
- Creator
- Jerry Yang, David Filo
- Released
- 1994
- Owner
- Apollo Global Management (since 2021)
The web's first great front door: a hand-built link directory that became a portal and later a case study in missed deals.
Jerry Yang and David Filo were Stanford PhD students when, in 1994, they started compiling "Jerry and David's Guide to the World Wide Web". They sorted the directory by hand and renamed it Yahoo!. Through the 1990s it was where people read the news, checked their email and set off browsing. Along the way it picked up GeoCities (1999), Flickr (2005) and later Tumblr.
Yahoo reportedly declined to buy Google for $1 million in 1998, and in 2008 it rejected a $44.6 billion offer from Microsoft. Disclosures in 2016 and 2017 revealed that a 2013 breach had hit every one of its three billion accounts. In 2017 Verizon bought the core business for about $4.5 billion. The name lives on, now owned by a private-equity firm.