Unlike current search engines, which use specialized programs to find and index any content and then sort the results generated by our searches using mathematical algorithms , made by hand, a job more typical of documentalists or librarians than of to bring order to the Web , a space in constant expansion, difficult to define and without an established order.
Although in subsequent years Yahoo
ended up with search technology, Yahoo! Search , its first raison d’être was a hand-managed web directory, later called the Yahoo! ( Yahoo! Directory ) and that for years has been more than forgotten. As a curiosity, Yahoo, which sounds like an onomapoteia, is the acronym for Yet Another Iran Phone Number List Hierarchically Organized Oracle , referring to its purpose of being a hierarchically organized source of knowledge. The Yahoo! Being one of the first and offering a great service means immediate success, and that’s what happened to Yahoo, which became the starting and reference page for many Internet users in the 90s.
From here, why limit yourself
to being a web directory if you can offer much more. Yahoo! Mail , for example, launches in 1997 (free email), being the main rival to Hotmail, the most popular webmail service for almost two decades. In 1998 Yahoo! Messenger , the free desktop messaging app that wanted to overshadow ATB Directory the then popular AIM or ICQ that veterans will remember. Other products that have also had a great impact were Yahoo News (1996), Yahoo Sports (1997) and Yahoo Finance (1997), which respectively offered current, sports and economic information at a time when the media (press, radio and TV) barely had their own web pages or were very rudimentary.
