Beautifully engraved certificate from the Yahoo! Inc. . This historic document was printed by the American Banknote Company and has an ornate border around it with a vignette of the company's logo. This item has the printed signatures of the company's Chairman/CEO (Jerry Yang) and Vice-President/General Counsel/Secretary (Jon Sobel). Terry Semel was named Yahoo!'s new Chairman and CEO in May 2001 Yahoo! Inc. is a global Internet communications, commerce and media company that offers a comprehensive branded network of services to more than 192 million individuals each month worldwide. As the first online navigational guide to the Web, www.yahoo.com is the leading guide in terms of traffic, advertising, household and business user reach. Yahoo! is the No. 1 Internet brand globally and reaches the largest audience worldwide. The company also provides online business and enterprise services designed to enhance the productivity and Web presence of Yahoo!'s clients. These services include Corporate Yahoo!, a popular customized enterprise portal solution; audio and video streaming; store hosting and management; and Web site tools and services. The company's global Web network includes 24 World properties. Yahoo! has offices in Europe, the Asia Pacific, Latin America, Canada and the United States, and is headquartered in Santa Clara, Calif. Like many other aspects of the computer age, Yahoo! began as an idea, grew into a hobby and lately has turned into a full-time passion. The two developers of Yahoo!, David Filo and Jerry Yang, Ph.D. candidates in Electrical Engineering at Stanford University, started their guide in April 1994 as a way to keep track of their personal interests on the Internet. Before long they found that their home-brewed lists were becoming too long and unwieldy. Gradually they began to spend more and more time on Yahoo!. During 1994 they converted Yahoo! into a customized database designed to serve the needs of the thousands of users that began to use the service through the closely bound Internet community. They developed customized software to help them efficiently locate, identify and edit material stored on the Internet. The name Yahoo! is supposed to stand for "Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle" but Filo and Yang insist they selected the name because they considered themselves yahoos. Yahoo! itself first resided on Yang's student workstation, "akebono" while the search engine was lodged on Filo's computer, "konishiki." (These machines were named after legendary Hawaiian sumo wrestlers.) In early 1995 Marc Andreessen, co-founder of Netscape Communications in Mountain View, Ca., invited Filo and Yang to move their files over to larger computers housed at Netscape. As a result Stanford's computer network returned to normal, and both parties benefited. Today, Yahoo! contains organized information on tens of thousands of computers linked to the Web. The San Jose Mercury news recently noted that "Yahoo is closest in spirit to the work of Linnaeus, the 18th century botanist whose classification system organized the natural world."