Technology · 2

What search engine, launched in 1994 as a human-curated web directory, was one of the first places people turned to find websites in the early years of the public World Wide Web?

Answer

Yahoo!

Yahoo!, founded by Jerry Yang and David Filo at Stanford in 1994, began as a hand-organized directory of websites rather than an algorithmic search engine. It was one of the earliest and most popular ways for people to discover websites in the mid-1990s, and the exclamation mark in its name was added because the plain word 'Yahoo' was already trademarked.

💡 Did you know?

Yahoo! originally stood for 'Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle' — a tongue-in-cheek acronym its Stanford student founders invented after the fact to fit a name they already loved.

Other options people guess

  • AltaVista
  • Ask Jeeves
  • Excite

Topics

  • world-wide-web
  • 1990s
  • search-engines
  • internet-history

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