Happy 15th Birthday Yahoo (Yahoooooooooooooooo!)

With so much press going to Google each day, it’s easy to forget the impact that Yahoo has had on the Internet over the past 15 years.

The story of Yahoo’s founding is well known: Stanford graduate students Jerry Yang and David Filo created a directory of web sites originally called “Jerry and David’s Guide to the World Wide Web,” and later renamed to “Yahoo” in 1994.

(Whew! The Yahoo marketing team dodged a bullet there. I firmly believe the  branding and catchy jingle helped cement their success against rival Lycos in those early days.)

Yahoo’s transition from a simple search/directory site into a full fledged online portal hasn’t always been smooth, but in the end the original social networking community and powerhouse online media company  (OMG! is the top celebrity news and gossip site online) will prevail.  Yahoo’s stock price has climbed some 30 per cent during Bartz’s 14-month CEO tenure and profits were in excess of $40 billion last year.

A turnaround akin to Apple’s most recent decade or revenue comparable to search engine powerhouse Google could take years, but don’t count Yahoo down and out.  Happy birthday Yahoo!