Yahoo is an American multination technology company. It provides a wide range of services like Web portal, search engine Yahoo! Search, including Yahoo! Directory, Yahoo! Mail, Yahoo! News, Yahoo! Finance, Yahoo! Groups, Yahoo! Answers, advertising, online mapping, video sharing, fantasy sports and its social media website. It is headquartered in Sunnyvale California.
The term "hierarchical" specifies how the Yahoo database was arranged in layers of subcategories.
The term "oracle" was intended to specify "source of truth and wisdom", and the term "officious", is used to specify that many office workers who would use the Yahoo database while surfing from work.
Yahoo was formed by Jerry Yang and David Filo in January 1994. They were electrical engineering students at Stanford University. First, they created a website named "Jerry and David's guide to the World Wide Web" but later, changed it as "yahoo.com" on 18 January 1995. They said that they selected the name yahoo because they like the general definition of the yahoo i.e. rude, unsophisticated, uncouth.