Good Characters, Inc. Blog

Developing a revolutionary concept, the first and still one of the biggest search engines of the Internet age, was easier than coming up with a name for that concept. Yahoo! founder Jerry Yang tried to explain to an audience in China where the name “Yahoo” came from.

His Chinese listeners probably knew nothing of the race of Yahoos English satirist Jonathan Swift created in his 18th-century novel Gulliver’s Travels. Swift’s Yahoos were a brutish people, almost ape-like, who lived very crudely without any sophisticated devices. Jerry Yang and Yahoo! co-founder David Filo sometimes referred to themselves as Yahoos, or simple guys with little knowledge of technology. 

To his Chinese audience, unfamiliar with the literary reference, Yang descried a Yahoo as a coarse, uncultured person. “Yahoo,” he said, sounds a little like “hoodlum,” which is a minor gangster. Yang said he had difficulty coming up with a name that was short and easy for people to remember. Finally he told himself that he would not sleep until he had just the right name. The name “Yahoo!” came to him, but he and Filo thought it sounded too uncouth. When they could not think of a better name, they settled on Yahoo! and it has been a household word for 11 years. Now, Yang says, choosing the name Yahoo! is one of the best decisions he has ever made.

Links:

• How they named companies
• The Name Game
• Jerry Yang explains how Yahoo was named (Chinese)
  杨致远解密雅虎取名 笑言 Yahoo 有点流氓