My Sweet 16 – Yahoo!

On 1 March 2011 Yahoo comes of age, sort of, as the date marks the search engines 16th anniversary.

So much has changed since Jerry Yang and David Filo filled their days trying to find and edit things on the Internet, itself a relatively new concept. Yahoo! as a company has seen many ups and downs during this period but it remains one of the most iconic and recognised search engines in the world.

“Thank you for celebrating with us”

A statement from the excited folk at Yahoo! read:

“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!”

So happy birthday to Yahoo!