Yahoo! is a California-based Internet company that was founded by Jerry Yang and David Filo in January 1994 and was incorporated on March 1, 1995. The word “yahoo” was used in Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels(1726) to describe a brutish human being. The Yahoo! backronym (back acronym) “Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle” has been cited in print since at least August 1995 and is said to have been first used by the company’s founders.
 
Another Yahoo! backronym is “You Always Have Other Options.”
 
 
Wikipedia: Yahoo!
Yahoo! Inc. is an American multinational Internet corporation headquartered in Sunnyvale, California. It is globally known for its Web portal, search engine Yahoo Search, and related services, including Yahoo Directory, Yahoo Mail, Yahoo News, Yahoo Finance, Yahoo Groups, Yahoo Answers, advertising, online mapping, video sharing, fantasy sports and its social media website. It is one of the most popular sites in the United States.[3] According to news sources, roughly 700 million people visit Yahoo websites every month.[4][5] Yahoo itself claims it attracts “more than half a billion consumers every month in more than 30 languages.”
 
Yahoo was founded by Jerry Yang and David Filo in January 1994 and was incorporated on March 1, 1995.
 
Wikipedia: Yahoo (Gulliver’s Travels)
A Yahoo is a legendary being in the novel Gulliver’s Travels (1726) by Jonathan Swift.
 
Swift describes them as being filthy and with unpleasant habits, resembling human beings far too closely for the liking of protagonist Lemuel Gulliver, who finds the calm and rational society of intelligent horses, the Houyhnhnms, greatly preferable. The Yahoos are primitive creatures obsessed with “pretty stones” they find by digging in mud, thus representing the distasteful materialism and ignorant elitism Swift encountered in Britain. Hence the term “yahoo” has come to mean “a crude, brutish or obscenely coarse person”.
     
Google Groups: rec.windsurfing
Costa Rica WWW URLs
jeremy pollack
8/14/95
(...) 
On the Yahoo (“Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle”) NetScape server. ...
 
Google Books
America Online’s Internet for Windows:
Easy Graphical Access—The AOL Way
By Tom Lichty
Research Triangle Park, NC: Ventana Press
1995
Pg. 271:
Everyone knows of Yahoo, but few know that it’s really an acronym for “Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle.”
 
Google News Archive
14 April 1996, Daily News (Bowling Green, KY), “Yahoo! Internet search engine a big stock hit” by Evan Ramstad (AP), pg. 7-A, col. 1:
THey called the company and the program Yahoo and themselves Chief Yahoos, even on their official filings with federal securities regulators. For people who needed one, they came up with a meaning for Yahoo —“Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle.”
 
Google Books
20 April 1998, Network World, “The Name Game” by Paul McNamara, pg. 77, col. 1:
Folklore holds that Yahoo stands for Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle, but company founders David Filo and Jerry Yang insist they chose the sobriquet simply because they considered themselves to be yahoos.
   
Google Books
Jerry Yang

By Paul Kupperberg
New York, NY: Chelsea House
2010
Pg. 12:
They also decided that Yahoo was an acronym for “Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle,” a self-deprecating bit of humor that showed that they did not take themselves or their list too seriously.
   
Google Books
The Yahoo! Style Guide:
The Ultimate Sourcebook for Writing, Editing, and Creating Content for the Digital World
Edited by Yahoo! (Chris Barr)
New York, NY: St. Martin’s Press
2010
Pg. ?:
One of the meanings of Yahoo! is the acronym’s spelled-out phrase: “Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle,” which suggests that the company founders had a sense of humor about their work.