In January 1994, Jerry Yang and David Filo were electrical engineering graduate students at Stanford University. In April 1994, "Jerry and David's Guide to the World Wide Web" was renamed "Yahoo!", for which the backronym is "Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle".[1][2] Filo and Yang said they chose the name because they liked the word's general meaning, which comes from Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift: "rude, unsophisticated and
uncouth".[3] Its URL was akebono.stanford.edu/yahoo. Yang says of their selection of the name, "We thought it fit well with what we were doing. It was irreverent. It was reflective of the Wild West nature of the Internet. A lot of people found it easy to remember, and besides, it's exactly what me and Jerry are. A couple of yahoos."[4]