Yahoo! began as the brain child of Jerry Yang and David Filo. As the legend goes, David and Jerry were engineering graduate students at Stanford University, who preferred surfing the Web to doing their doctoral research. Things really got rolling in the Spring of 1994, when their Ph.D. advisor took a sabbatical in Italy, leaving Jerry and David with time to explore the potential of the Internet.

The two of them took to categorizing web sites as a way to conveniently keep track of all the sites they had visited. They posted this list on the Web as "Jerry and David's Guide to the World Wide Web." The directory became wildly popular as the first place for people browsing the Web to intelligently find sites.

From there, the directory had a quick name change to Yahoo!, and the rest, as they say, is history.

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