In 1997, the interface of Yahoo! was available in seven languages:
English, French, German, Japanese, Korean, Norwegian, and Swedish, with
websites classified in 63 sections. Yahoo! was launched three years
earlier by David Filo and Jerry Lang, two students at Stanford
University, California, as an online directory to give access to
websites and sort them out by topics. The directory quickly became
quite popular because people found it more handy than search engines
like AltaVista, where these tasks were fully automated. However, when a
search didn't give any result in Yahoo!, it was automatically shunted
to AltaVista, and vice versa.