Today in history:

Yahoo! Is Incorporated
In 1994, two Stanford PhD candidates began indexing interesting websites as a hobby. “Jerry and David's Guide to the World Wide Web” launched as Yahoo! in 1995, and it has since grown to become the largest information portal on the Web. Initially, Yahoo! distinguished itself as a “directory” by employing indexing specialists to categorize websites, but the Web has since grown so large that the use of automated spiders has become something of a necessity.

Early history (1994-1996)
In January 1994, Stanford graduate students Jerry Yang and David Filo created a website named "Jerry's Guide to the World Wide Web." Jerry's Guide to the World Wide Web was a directory of other websites, organized in a hierarchy, as opposed to a searchable index of pages. In April 1994, "Jerry's Guide to the World Wide Web" was renamed "Yahoo!". Filo and Yang said they selected the name because they liked the word's general definition, as in Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift: "rude, unsophisticated, uncouth." The name can also be a backronym for "Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle". Its URL was akebono.stanford.edu/yahoo. By the end of 1994, Yahoo had already received one million hits. Yang and Filo realized their website had massive business potential, and on 1 March 1995, Yahoo was incorporated. On 12 April 1996, Yahoo had its initial public offering, raising $33.8 million dollars, by selling 2.6 million shares at $13 each. "Yahoo" had already been trademarked for barbecue sauce, knives (by EBSCO Industries) and human propelled watercraft (by Old Town Canoe Co.). Therefore, in order to get the trademark, Yang and Filo added the exclamation mark to the name.