Yahoo! is an old man now! OK, perhaps not so much. But it was just ten years ago that this ‘Jerry’s Guide to the World Wide Web’ was renamed into something will a little more kick. You know, something like Yahoo!

The web portal has undergone remarkable change since it was set up by Stanford University students David Filo and Jerry Yang in a campus trailer.

The students wanted a way of keeping track of their web-based interests.

The categories lists they devised soon became popular to hundreds of people and the two saw business potential in their idea.

Rude and uncouth

Originally dubbed “Jerry’s Guide to the World Wide Web” the firm adopted the moniker Yahoo because the founders liked the dictionary definition of a yahoo as a rude, unsophisticated, uncouth person.

The term was popularised by the 18th Century satirist Jonathan Swift in his classic novel, Gulliver’s Travels.

“We were certainly not sophisticated or civilised,” Mr Yang told reporters ahead of the anniversary, which will be officially recognised on 2 March.

We wanted to build products that satisfied our users wants and needs
Jerry Yang

They did have business brains however, and in April 1995 persuaded venture capitalists Sequoia Capital, which also invested in Apple Computer and Cisco Systems, to fund Yahoo to the tune of $2m (£1.04m).