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Yahoo (Gulliver's Travels)

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A yahoo in the original sense is a vile and savage creature, filthy and with unpleasant habits, resembling human beings far too closely for the liking of the narrator of Gulliver's Travels, who finds the calm and rational society of the Houyhnhms far preferable.


Yahoo! (spelled with the exclamation point) is a popular Internet portal and search engine: http://www.yahoo.com/.

The Web site started out as "Jerry's Guide to the World Wide Web" but eventually received a new moniker with the help of a dictionary. The name Yahoo! is an acronym for "Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle," but Filo and Yang insist they selected the name because they liked the general definition of a yahoo: "rude, unsophisticated, uncouth." Yahoo! itself first resided on Yang's student workstation, "Akebono," while the software was lodged on Filo's computer, "Konishiki" - both named after legendary sumo wrestlers. Source: http://docs.yahoo.com/info/misc/history.html