Yahoo! is the name of a company that offers a fast method for searching the World Wide Web on the Internet, and the company has been very successful and recently went public to raise funds for further growth. Growth of the Web itself has been rapid, and this has meant a tangle of web pages, hotlinks, and new sites. Explorers on the Internet often get lost. As of January 1, 1996 the World Wide Web had some 200,000 sites, or Web servers, offering close to 20,000,000 pages of information.
Yahoo! has been a pioneer in this area and believes that some 1 million people per day take 7 million looks at Web pages from its directory. Advertisers see this as an opportunity, though to date only Yahoo! reports that its operation is profitable. Advertisers see this technology as a way to pinpoint marketing messages to individual consumers. Yahoo! remains the leading company, the first to market this service and a company backed by some $6 million in venture capital. it turns profits by selling advertising on its pages to more than 50 advertisers. the company was founded in 1994 (Verity 88-90). Yahoo! made its first public offering on the stock market in April 1996. Yahoo! stands for "yet another hierarchical officious oracle." Founders Jerry Yang and David Filo created their own list of web sites and then decided to put their list on the Internet, and the response was so strong that they decided to create a business and to make money by selling advertising. America Online tried to buy them out, but they decided to go it on their own (Plummer 122-124).
The Internet was developed by the government as Arpanet as a means of communication within the scientific community, and it operates by providing links between computers in a loose fashion so that the computers of any university or scientific facility could communicate with any other. The Internet grew until it included a wide variety of servers linke
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