With all the commotion surrounding Microsoft’s offer to purchase Yahoo I realized that I didn’t really know much about Yahoo. So I did a little research and gathered the following 10 interesting facts about Yahoo.

1. Stanford Student’s Jerry Yang and David Filo first started Yahoo! in February of 1994 to keep track of their own interests online. They named their project “Jerry’s Guide to the World Wide Web.”

2. In April the name of Jerry’s Guide to the World Wide Web was changed to Yahoo, which is an acronym for “Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle.”

3. Yang and Filo added the exclamation point to the end of Yahoo! because “Yahoo” was already owned by a company that produced BBQ sauce.

4. The owners of Yahoo considered buying Google before went public. However, at the time Yahoo decided that a few billion dollars was too much to pay to buy out their competitor.

5. Yahoo’s email service, which they purchased from Four11 in 1997, is still considered to be the most popular email program in America.

6. In 2006 Yahoo’s image search gained criticism for displaying sexually explicit images in their results, even when the SafeSearch was on. Less than a year later the image search feature was shut down and replaced with Yahoo’s recently acquired Flickr photo sharing community.

7. Yahoo currently owns and operates over fifty different web properties, most of which are sites that gained popularity before being acquired by Yahoo. Some examples include Geocities, Yahoo! Games, Del.icio.us, Flickr, and Upcoming.org.

8. One of Yahoo’s highest priced acquisitions was Broadcast.com, which they paid a reported $5.7 billion for. On the other hand, their cheapest acquisition was their purchase of Net Controls for slightly over $1 million in 1997.

9. In March of 2005 Yahoo celebrated it’s 10 year anniversary by giving away free Baskin Robins ice cream coupons to all of their users.

10. Yahoo began as a project created by two individuals and has grown to employ estimated 13,000 full time individuals.