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Yet Another Hierarchically Officious Oracle is the tongue-in-cheek acronym for Yahoo Inc., the large Internet portal that has, at various times, described itself as a platform company, a social networking company, an advertising company or a content company.
Techopedia Explains Yet Another Hierarchically Officious Oracle
Yahoo emerged from the efforts of Jerry Yang and David Filo in 1994, when they put together a collection of other websites, which they called David and Jerr’s Guide to the World Wide Web. The list’s bookmarks grew long and became arranged in a hierarchical fashion – hence the word in the acronym. The term “oracle” was added because it sounded officious and was supposed to mean authoritative.
Being young Standford graduates with the requisite sense of humor, Yang and Filo likened themselves to the slang definition of a “yahoo,” referring to a rude, unsophisticated or uncouth person.
The term “yahoo” first appeared in the novel “Gulliver’s Travels”, by Jonathan Swift. Yahoos were the deformed, crude, dirty “brutes” of the land of the Houyhnhnms. The Yahoos were depicted as irrational people who represented the worst side of humanity. By contrast, their masters, the wise and gentle Houyhnhnms, were rational horses that represented humanity at its best.
