From the Internet History Podcast:
Filo had discovered the Mosaic browser shortly after it was released, and this led the pair to an all-consuming obsession with the World Wide Web. In those days, it was still possible to visit every single website in existence in a matter of a few hours. But new websites were popping up every day. So, in the hours when they should have been doing research, they were browsing the web instead, trying to find and catalog the new. Always a bit intellectually competitive, the two began collecting and trading links to the new websites they found. They started compiling these favorite links into a list, each trying to outdo the other by finding the coolest new site of the day. “I kept bugging Dave to show me the sites he had found,” Yang remembered later. “So he made his hot-list, and I made my hot-list, and he wrote some software to combine both our lists.”
This was right at the moment when Mosaic was lighting the fuse under the powder keg that was the early web. As the web grew that summer, things got a bit more complicated. Because Yang’s workstation was hooked up to Stanford’s public Internet connection, other people could view the list the two were generating by going to http://akebono.stanford.edu. The list was called Jerry’s Guide to the World Wide Web (initially, Filo didn’t want his name attached) and it proved popular among Yang and Filo’s group of friends. Word of mouth spread news of the list even further and soon complete strangers were emailing in suggestions of new sites to be included.
On the Yahoo! name:
The pair decided that their project needed a better name. A convention among software developers at the time was to name projects “Yet Another Something Something.” For example, YAML was Yet Another Markup Language. So, Yang and Filo settled on the name Yahoo!, which they claimed stood for Yet Another Hierarchical, Officious Oracle. The exclamation point was irreverent and entirely intentional—as Filo put it, “Pure marketing hype.” The url became http://akebono.stanford.edu/yahoo.
On leaving Stanford’s hallowed halls:
Stanford had a long history of being supportive toward student-run projects that may or may not evolve into startups at some later date. So, at least initially, Stanford was a generous host of Yahoo’s traffic and content, free of charge. When Netscape launched its beta browser late in 1994, it decided to make Yahoo the default link when a user clicked the “Directory” button on the top menu of the browser. No one could have anticipated it beforehand, but it turned out that having a button in Navigator’s menu bar was almost as valuable as having an icon on the Windows desktop. All those early web users who surfed the web via Netscape were introduced to Yahoo as the defacto search utility. The flow of curious web searchers grew into a flood. Yahoo had its first million hit day late in 1994. By January of 1995, soon after the domain Yahoo.com was registered, Yahoo had grown into a directory of 10,000 sites and was getting more than 100,000 unique visitors a day. The servers began to struggle under the deluge. And it turned out that there was a limit to Stanford’s generosity. The university asked Yang and Filo to find another host for their website.
I absolutely loved this read. Fascinating to relive this chapter in tech history.