Next year, Yahoo!, one of the first and arguably most successful Internet brands, will celebrate its tenth anniversary. Says the official corporate history:

The Web site started out as “Jerry’s Guide to the World Wide Web” but eventually received a new moniker with the help of a dictionary. The name Yahoo! is an acronym for “Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle,” but Filo and Yang insist they selected the name because they liked the general definition of a yahoo: “rude, unsophisticated, uncouth.”

What the name Yahoo! also did very successfully was to set the company apart from a sea of clones that came before or would come soon after: Infoseek, LookSmart, FindWhat, GoTo, etc.

Yet some professional naming companies begrudged Yahoo! its good sense, even going so far as to predict they might not last a full decade with such an “amateur” name, as noted in today’s time capsule find, Ruth Shallit’s very informative and entertaining The Name Game, originally published on Salon way back in 1999:

…For some, the fact that they came up with their names all by themselves, without recourse to professional help, has become a point of pride. “I love our name,” Jeff Mallett, president and CEO of Yahoo, recently told an industry newsletter. “It’s fun, irreverent and consumer-focused. And it wasn’t conjured up by Landor, or some huge naming agency.”

It’s this sort of chutzpah that makes the namers at Landor see red. “The Internet is filled with arrogance,” says Amy Becker coldly. “You might have a provocative, fun name. But do you have the basis for a lasting brand? We still don’t know how compelling a brand Yahoo will be 10 years from now. I sense a real missed opportunity.”

Fortunately, Landor’s “lost opportunity” was Yahoo!’s — and the Internet community’s — gain. Sometimes “amateurs” intuitively grasp what makes brands work, and come up with names like “Yahoo!” and “Google.” For a professional comparision, check out Landor’s Portfolio and read how they made the most of high tech and Internet naming opportunities by crafting names like Tality, Solekia, Certigy and Qarana.

The roots of Qarana are most enlightening, according to its creator: “The name ‘qarana’ originated from an Indian language called Jain, which means ‘to cause.’ The Brand Driver, ‘Beginner’s Mind’, signifies that Qarana is not the end but rather the beginning of a whole new experience.”