'Yahoo! Inc. ' is the name of an American media and web technology company founded in 1995 by Jerry Yang and David Filo. At first it was a kind of 'Bookmark' or 'Favorites' published on the Internet with sites organized by categories, to then offer a search engine and other services such as news, mail, instant messaging, . . . The portal with several of those services still exists, though the company was bought by Verizone in 2016. There is more than one version about the origin of the name; one says it's an acronym for Yet Another Hierarchical Organized Oracle! ( "Another oracle more organized by hierarchies!" ) ironically describing its first online version, there is also a legend about David Filo's father calling his son and friend "pair of yahoos!" ( "pair of savages!" ) for their antics as children, but according to their creators it is because of the derogatory way they used at Stanford University -where they studied- to qualify southern students, simple and unsophisticated, which they found sympathetic. In the latter two cases, the term is taken from the novel Gulliver's Travels (Jonathan Swift, 1726), where a yahoo is a human-like being, but crude, wild and uncultured. Although for unbelievable origins, I prefer the one found by the Italian philosopher Umberto Eco from the Borgean tale The Brodie Report, where the yahoos were also rustic but able to understand a phrase with their simple monosyllabic language. . . but also to be confused.
