Where does the name 'yahoo!' come from?

Question:

Where does the name 'yahoo!' come from?

l am looking for the inspiration for the name 'yahoo!' for the dot com company

Best Answer - Chosen by Asker: The word "Yahoo" was invented by Jonathan Swift for the Travels. He and his friends used the word among themselves.

In part IV of the Travels - Houyhnhnm Land, Gulliver initially mistakes the Yahoos for beasts, or cattle, since they are so repulsive in appearance and action. Eventually he concludes they are human, possibly descended from a pair shipwrecked long ago. Once Gulliver determines humans and Yahoos are the same, he begins to call all people "Yahoos."

Perhaps there is a bit of truth to the legend that David and Jerry who were engineering graduate students at Stanford University, preferred surfing the Web to doing their doctorial research and that things got "rocking and rolling!"

'Tis hard to remember that when our dynamic duo started "Jerry's Guide to the World Wide Web" in 1993 to keep track of their favorite Websites from a trailer on campus that there were but a few hundred web sites. In the fall of 1994 the one million hit mark was reached and the Stanford servers were probably straining under the load.

In early 1995 Marc Andressen, co-founder of Netscape Communications, invited Filo and Yang to move their files over to the larger computers housed at Netscape and "Jerry's Guide to the World Wide Web" was christened Yahoo!