Tuesday, November 27, 2007

Acronym Expanded: Yahoo

The claim is, the name for the exclamatory web site came from one of pages of bookmarked links to the rest of the brand-new World Wide Web, back in April 1994. According to page 2 of PC Advisor's "The 15 most important days in web history:"

Some hobbies take on a life of their own; others change the world. In early 1994, Stanford PhD students Jerry Yang and David Filo posted a list of their favourite sites on the web. The exact date they posted the links is lost to history, but we do know the list's original name: "Jerry and David's Guide to the World Wide Web."

By April '94 it had a new tongue-in-cheek name: "Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle," …

A page on Yahoo's PR site provides verification.

If you win a bar bet with this one, I want a cut.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Well if you know that about Yahoo you probably also know that Adidas stands for:

All Day I Dream About Sports

bjkeefe said...

TC:

I did not know that. Thanks. How sure are you about this?

Other favorites:

The old department store, E. J. Korvettes, came from "Eight Jewish Korean War Veterans."

SWAG: Both "Silly Wild-Ass Guess" and "Stuff We All Get."

Anonymous said...

Not sure at all. I heard it from someone who heard it from someone. May be an urban myth. A check of Google for the name turns this up in Wikipedia:

The company was named after its founder, Adolf (Adi) Dassler, in 1948. Dassler had been producing shoes starting in 1920 in Herzogenaurach, near Nuremberg, with the help of his brother, Rudolf Dassler, who later formed the other shoe company Puma. The company registered as adidas AG (with lower-case lettering) on 18 August 1949.

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