Yahoo began as two Stanford graduate students keeping a list of their favorite websites. Jerry Yang and David Filo sorted the young web by hand into categories, and strangers started using their list to find things. By the time the company filed to go public in 1996, the web was growing too fast for anyone to map. Yahoo was betting that people would always want a guide, and that advertisers would pay to stand where everyone started.

A Guide Built by Hand

Yang and Filo started the directory in 1994 and turned it into a company the next year. Their edge was human judgment. Editors looked at sites and filed them under topics, so a search on Yahoo led to pages a person had checked. The service was free. Yahoo made its money from banner ads shown to the crowds who came to look things up. Its playful name and loud exclamation point set it apart from the stiff portals of big media companies.

Thirty-Three Dollars by Close

Yahoo priced its IPO at $13 a share in April 1996. The stock opened at $24.50, touched $43, and closed its first day at $33. The company spent the next decade as one of the giants of the web, adding mail, news, finance, and sports. Google overtook it in search. In June 2017 Verizon bought Yahoo's core business for $4.48 billion. The leftover holdings, including its stake in Alibaba, became an investment company called Altaba.

Cover: The Signpost (Der Wegweiser), plate ten from the series Poems, Sophie Reinhard. Art Institute of Chicago, public domain. Chosen for a signpost (a guide to the web).