The name actually alludes to characters in Gulliver's Travels. This tongue-in-cheek reference exemplifies our penchant for having fun and not taking ourselves too seriously. Our founders also turned the company name into an acronym:

Yahoo! is an innovative technology company that operates the largest digital media, content, and communications business in the world.

 

Digital media: Yahoo! is the leading online ad network in the U.S., with more total unique visitors, average daily visitors, and total pages viewed than any other ad network, according to comScore data. Only Yahoo! combines the Science and Art of getting the right message to the right consumers in quality context – engaging consumers at Scale on a premium digital canvas – to help connect businesses with consumers in ways that drive results.

 

Content: We create original content and surface the best of the digital world, drawing from our own staff of reporters and editors, hundreds of news sources globally, and hundreds of thousands of contributors. Yahoo! News Network, Yahoo! Sports, Yahoo! Finance, and omg! attract the greatest number of unique visitors both in the U.S. and in the world each month in their categories, according to comScore data.

 

Communications: We connect you to the people who matter most. Yahoo! Mail is the No. 1 email service in the U.S. with more than 92 million unique visitors – almost twice the audience of the No. 2-ranked Gmail, according to comScore data. And Yahoo! Messenger is the top-ranked instant messaging service in the U.S., attracting more than 20 million unique visitors per month.

Yahoo! branded sites attracted more than 627 million unique visitors per month, reaching 47.4 percent of the global online population and accounting for 4.7 percent of all time spent online globally.” (comScore Media Metrix, Worldwide, December 2010)