Classics on the Billboard
Yahoo is the beast Gulliver met
One of the first big names of the web is borrowed from a brutish creature in a satire.
On the billboard
Yahoo was started by two Stanford graduate students, Jerry Yang and David Filo. They explained the name as an acronym for "Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle," and said they liked the word itself, which Gulliver's Travels made a byword for someone rude and unsophisticated. A guide to the internet chose to call itself a lout.
In the book Gulliver's Travels · Jonathan Swift
In Jonathan Swift's novel, Gulliver passes through the lands of tiny people and giants before reaching the country of the Houyhnhnms, rational beings in the shape of horses. Their Yahoos are coarse, greedy creatures that look much like people. Swift holds them up like a mirror and asks how highly we really ought to think of ourselves.