Yahoo Turns 16 Years Old

On March 1st, Yahoo turned 16 years old – celebrating their sweet 16, as they put it. Yahoo was founded by Jerry Yang and David Filo in January 1994 but was incorporated on March 1, 1995 in Santa Clara, California. Since then Yahoo has been through CEOs, including Terry Semel who was replaced by founder, […]

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Happy Birthday YahooOn March 1st, Yahoo turned 16 years old – celebrating their sweet 16, as they put it.

Yahoo was founded by Jerry Yang and David Filo in January 1994 but was incorporated on March 1, 1995 in Santa Clara, California. Since then Yahoo has been through CEOs, including Terry Semel who was replaced by founder, Jerry Yang, who stepped down and was eventually replaced by current Yahoo CEO, Carol Bartz.

It has been a tough few years for Yahoo, seeing their stock slide, a failed attempt at building their own search engine to compete against Google, losing lots of high profile employees, and poor quarterly results, quarter after quarter.

Yahoo posted about their 16th birthday saying:

It may be hard to believe, but only 16 years ago the Internet was a mostly undiscovered frontier. Jerry Yang and David Filo – Stanford Ph.D. students at the time – started dabbling in Web searches as a hobby. As David has said, “The Internet was a great place to waste time.”

But their passion for locating, identifying and editing information stored on the Internet – soon to be known as “David and Jerry’s Guide to the World Wide Web” – evolved into much more than a hobby, of course.

In March 1995, Yahoo! was incorporated as a business, and by April 1996, our company stock was already being sold publicly on the NASDAQ.

Today, more than 13,000 people from Sunnyvale to Singapore are proud to call themselves Yahoos.

Thank you for celebrating with us all these years–and here’s to many more!

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About the author

Barry Schwartz
Staff
Barry Schwartz is a Contributing Editor to Search Engine Land and a member of the programming team for SMX events. He owns RustyBrick, a NY based web consulting firm. He also runs Search Engine Roundtable, a popular search blog on very advanced SEM topics. Barry can be followed on Twitter here.

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