David Filo and Jerry Yang originally launched their internet directory under the incredibly dry name 'Jerry and David's Guide to the World Wide Web' before wisely rebranding to the acronym Yahoo.

A closer look

David Filo and Jerry Yang originally launched their internet directory under the incredibly dry name 'Jerry and David's Guide to the World Wide Web' before wisely rebranding to the acronym Yahoo. The new name officially stood for 'Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle', which was a self-deprecating nod to the sheer volume of indexing projects popping up during the early days of the digital boom. It is deeply funny that a company that once completely dominated global internet traffic practically named itself as a sarcastic joke about being just another redundant spreadsheet. Of course, given their dramatic decline over the decades after famously refusing to buy Google, the cynical irony of their self-imposed title as an 'officious oracle' has aged like a fine glass of unrefrigerated milk