<P> Yahoo! was started at Stanford University . It was founded in January 1994 by Jerry Yang and David Filo, who were Electrical Engineering graduate students when they created a website named "Jerry and David's Guide to the World Wide Web". The Guide was a directory of other websites, organized in a hierarchy, as opposed to a searchable index of pages . In April 1994, Jerry and David's Guide to the World Wide Web was renamed "Yahoo!". The word "YAHOO" is a backronym for "Yet Another Hierarchically Organized Oracle" or "Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle ." The yahoo.com domain was created on January 18, 1995 . </P> <P> Yahoo! grew rapidly throughout the 1990s and diversified into a web portal, followed by numerous high - profile acquisitions . The company's stock price skyrocketed during the dot - com bubble and closed at an all - time high of US $118.75 in 2000; however, after the dot - com bubble burst, it reached an all - time low of US $8.11 in 2001 . Yahoo! formally rejected an acquisition bid from the Microsoft Corporation in 2008 . In early 2012, the largest layoff in Yahoo!'s history was completed and 2,000 employees (14 percent of the workforce) lost their jobs . </P> <P> Carol Bartz replaced co-founder Jerry Yang as CEO in January 2009, but was fired by the board of directors in September 2011; Tim Morse was appointed as interim CEO following Bartz's departure . Former PayPal president Scott Thompson became CEO in January 2012 and after he resigned was replaced by Ross Levinsohn as the company's interim CEO on May 13, 2012 . On July 16, former Google executive Marissa Mayer, became the CEO of the company . </P> <P> Upon the April 1994 renaming of Jerry and David's Guide to the World Wide Web to Yahoo!, Yang and Filo said that "Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle" was a suitable backronym for this name, but they insisted they had selected the name because they liked the word's general definition, as in Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift: "rude, unsophisticated, uncouth ." Its URL was akebono.stanford.edu/yahoo . </P>

What did jerry and david develop and why