The Oracle of Yahoo Has Internet Surfers Going Gaga : Cyberspace: The success of the comprehensive list is due in part to a classic case of grad student procrastination.
It started out as a short, personal list of favorite sites on the Internet, the worldwide computer network. It grew, and grew some more. Within a year it had become, improbably enough, one of the most important organizing forces in all of cyberspace.
And last week its keepers decided to get down to business: They collected a hefty sum from a venture capital firm, dropped out of Stanford University and began looking for office space. The amount of the investment by Menlo Park-based Sequoia Capital was not disclosed, but sources said it was in excess of $1 million.
“Actually, we’re sitting here planning our escape to South America,” joked David Filo, 28, who with 26-year-old Jerry Yang created the list of lists known as Yahoo--Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle--that is consulted each day by 200,000 of the Internet’s lost souls.
Actually, Filo and Yang are not escaping to anywhere. The two are sitting in the cramped trailer where they created Yahoo while pretending to write their electrical engineering dissertations, trying to figure out what to do next. Their story is emblematic of the Internet, which was itself conceived of as something entirely different than the mass communications and commerce tool it is becoming today.
As the Internet continues its transformation from an electronic meeting place for academics--held together largely by volunteer labor--others will surely follow Filo and Yang in their struggle to figure out how to profit from an obscure hobby that had grown to consume their lives.
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But few are likely to attract the attention generated by Yahoo, which fortuitously filled the most unmet need of Net surfers around the globe: How to find what they’re looking for. Yahoo lists 36,000 sites on the World Wide Web, classified by subject and tagged with brief descriptions--and the number of listing is doubling each month.
The Web is the fastest-growing portion of the Internet, held together by a system of hypertext links that allow users to jump from one site to another simply by clicking on a highlighted word or image. But because of the decentralized nature of the network--controlled by thousands of different entities and owned by no one--the vast sea of information has gone largely uncatalogued.
That annoyed Filo and Yang, who began surfing the Net in earnest last year. So they started their own list of sites--computer science programs at other universities, NASA information, sumo wrestling, sound bites from “The Simpsons.” In April, they put their list on the Web, created a way for people to send them links to add, and began compulsively classifying.
With 300 to 400 requests a day for new listings, it quickly became all-consuming, especially with the tough dilemmas they faced over where certain sites belonged in the elaborate scheme. What to do with the one that described itself as “how to make strawberry Pop Tarts explode”? Is that humor or food? What about the dinosaur tooth for sale? (It ended up under “collectibles.”)
“It surprised us,” Yang said, “and it was kind of flattering. You realize something you’re doing could be affecting a lot of people and you want to do it well.”
Among the most popular categories, each with their own sub-levels and sub-sub-levels, are entertainment, dating, multimedia, regional information, and business. They had to ax the erotica category because the sites under it, inundated by visitors as soon as they were listed on Yahoo, kept crashing.
There are other lists on the Net. But none are quite as comprehensive as Yahoo, whose success is due in part to a classic case of grad student procrastination.
“No one was as stupid as Jerry and I, doing this mundane work, going through hundreds of entries a day and categorizing them,” Filo said. “But we did enjoy it--we’d always rather be doing that than doing our research.”
One reason for Yahoo’s popularity may the extent to which Filo and Yang have gone to observe “netiquette.” They knew that with 2 million “hits” a day on their pages, they could attract advertisers. Or they could sell the information they were collecting on which categories are the most popular.
But advertising is still frowned on in the Internet community, and the two friends were reluctant to be among the first to practice it. Now, however, the plan is to seek sponsors, and to license the service to on-line providers and other companies who benefit from having it available to Internet users.
One of those companies, Netscape Communications Inc., which distributes the most popular browser program on the Web and includes a link to Yahoo as a starting point for users, began providing Filo and Yang with computer equipment and a high-speed connection to the Internet last month.
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Others, such as Prodigy Services Co., CompuServe, America Online and other telecommunications and media companies, began approaching Filo and Yang last year with offers to buy their service and hire them to run it.
But Filo, who hails from Mossbluff, La., and Yang, born in Taiwan and raised in San Jose, decided they wanted to maintain control over Yahoo despite the difficulties of impending competition from deep-pocketed corporations.
The two doctoral candidates had hoped to finish their degrees this year before making a decision about what to do with their ever-lengthening list. But they realized their opportunity is now, and they signed leaves of absence from Stanford last week once their financing deal was done.
“We know there will be a lot of competition,” Filo said. “They all told us, ‘If we don’t buy you, we’re going to have to do it ourselves.’ There’s not a whole lot of barriers to what we’ve done--it’s only been the two of us doing it for the year, and not even full time.”
Still, it may be tough to slow Yahoo’s momentum, or to outdo the popularity it has garnered among Internet users. And so far, the newly incarnated entrepreneurs have been too busy to let fame and fortune go to their heads.
“Can you hang on?” Filo asked during a recent telephone interview. “I think the machine just crashed.”
