Back in 1995, working as an executive software recruiter, I noticed that everything in the tech industry ran on acronyms — CTI, SCM, CRM, and on and on. At the same time, I was chasing a simpler question: sitting at an empty bar in Seattle, it dawned on me that there had to be a better way to know which bar was actually popular at that moment. Where do ya go to meet people? When do ya go? What kind of place fits you, and what part of the city is it in?
I leveraged that instinct into an idea: use local informants — the “road warriors” of the bar and restaurant world, the bartenders, waiters, and bus boys who actually know what’s happening on a given night — to build a real-time picture of where people were actually going. Not necessarily the best food or atmosphere, but where people go.
In 1997, I gave that idea structure with two acronyms:
A.D.A.M. — Area Designated Activity Module. ADAM likes to get right to the point: where do yago? Countries, states, regions, cities, towns, neighborhoods, events, parks, websites, airports — any place.
E.V.E. — Entertainment Vicinity Educator. EVE is more inclined to ask for directions: things yago — eat, dance, listen to music, sightsee, walk, golf, shop, get my nails done, the bank, have a cocktail, watch sports, meet people, find a hotel, the grocery store, the garage.
Since the beginning, entertainment has started with Adam and Eve. Cities are made up of many different areas — each one an ADAM. EVE asks questions about ADAM. Usually ADAM and EVE end up at the same place. So: ya go to ADAM, then ya go to EVE, which leads you to entertainment.
Around the same time, I realized “yago” wasn’t just a made-up name — it was a word everyone already used every day, a short way of saying “you go.” Where do you go became where do yago, how do yago, when do yago. It just made sense. And it happened to double as an acronym in its own right: Your Area Guide Organizer — a quasi travel site — and later, more broadly, You Are Going Online.
It also, by pure luck, happened to combine the first two letters of Yahoo and the first two letters of Google. Four-letter URLs were golden back then, and still are.
In 1999, the idea finally became a website: yago.com launched in Seattle. Here’s our first crude page of what yago was: www.yago.com/1.htm
Over 25 years later, yago’s original idea — and its unique navigation — remains relevant today.
Pronunciation: The “a” in yago is pronounced like the “a” in acute. Thus — where do yago?
Yago is a word we say for “you go.” If that lands, you already get it. If it doesn’t, feel free to go back to wherever ya go.
It’s also home to a family of acronyms that fit almost any business or interest:
There ya go.
Branding, in simple terms, means establishing such a strong identity for a product or service that potential customers think of you first when they’re in the market for it. With all the competition on the Web for a surfer’s attention, you need to not only differentiate yourself but become “the source” in your category. Even large, successful companies actively develop a strong online brand — the question is how.
How do you compete with large, well-known companies to build a brand identity? Simple: yago it. www.name.yago.com
Using your brand in a tagline or slogan. More and more online businesses have taken their brand name offline into TV and radio — repeating their name, verbally and visually, until it becomes synonymous with “the source” in their category.
What can branding do for you? In “Cyberbrand Study: Web Branding Opens Links to Customers” (Alice Z. Cuneo, Advertising Age’s NetMarketing Online), a GISTICS Inc. survey of 4,000 brand management, creative, and production professionals found that successful digital brand-building requires a two-part strategy: one focused on business process — how a company finds, serves, and satisfies customers — and one focused on branding process — how a company manages media and positions its message in a competitive, crowded market. A strong brand on the Web results in higher sales and conversion rates, and more opportunity to sell into the aftermarket.
Using yago’s strategy helps you brand and get hits at the same time. One of the most important levers for driving traffic is the name itself — a web name that incorporates the actual keyword a visitor is searching for is one of the most reliable ways to get found. If the good names in your category are already taken, rethink the strategy: www.keyword.yago.com — short, easy to remember, and redirects straight to your site. It just makes sense.
Talk to us about your e-business — we think we can help.
It’s a four-letter URL, which means it surfaces sooner in a web search — four-letter domains improve your ranking. And since most good, short domain names are long gone, YAGO gives you a way around that: use it as a sub-domain.
Here’s how it works. Say you run a growing real estate business, but every good real-estate domain is taken. With YAGO, you just yago it: your site becomes realestate.yago.com, which redirects to your existing site (say, John Doe Real Estate).
That gets you hits in several ways:
Want more precision? Use your city, state, or region: Texas.yago.com, Dallas.yago.com, or even DallasRealEstate.yago.com — all redirecting to your original site, broadening your exposure and increasing visits.
We think we’ve stumbled into a business opportunity that offers a range of internet options — but the most important one may be improving your web ranking. The first 100 set-ups are free; if you don’t like it, we’ll remove it immediately. Talk to us and we’ll get you set up.
Yagō (屋号), literally “house name,” is a term from traditional Japanese culture for names passed down within a guild, studio, or other lineage outside of blood relations — synonymous with iena (家名) and kadona (角名). It most often refers to the guild names of kabuki actors, but also applies to names artists take from their masters or studios, names taken from a family business, and similar circumstances.
The ya (屋) in yagō — often seen at the end of the name — means “house,” “roof,” or “shop,” and points to the term’s origins. A number of yagō have associated mon emblems, some incorporating rebuses (see Japanese rebus monogram).
History. Originally, yagō were place names of homes or buildings, taken on by whoever lived there — even when a house changed hands entirely, the new family often kept the name. A family became better known by their yagō than by their actual surname. The custom’s origin is unclear, but it first appears in print in the chronicles of the Muromachi period. For centuries, commoners in Japan had no family names, so yagō arose to describe people by location, occupation, or the shop they owned — a pattern with parallels in how family names evolved in other cultures.
Yagō also helped differentiate the status of lineages sharing a surname, or simply distinguished people with the same family name within a village. Houses might be known by location — in a meadow (原, Hara) or at the foot of a hill (坂本, Sakamoto) — and families took on those place-names. Yagō could also mark the main and branch lines of a family.
The custom became especially prominent in kabuki theater, where actors take a name tied to their guild. Ichikawa Danjūrō V, though born into the Ichikawa family, was also known by the yagō Naritaya (“Narita house”), marking his guild lineage and connecting him to others trained alongside him. Actors’ yagō were often chosen to recall earlier great performers, and it remains common practice (kakegoe) for audience members to call out an actor’s yagō when he executes a line or pose particularly well.
Artists, writers, and poets in Japan — as elsewhere — often took pen names or pseudonyms, sometimes derived from a mentor’s name (particularly in painting studios), in which case they could count as yagō. More often, though, these art-names are called kagō (家号) or simply gō (号).
During the Edo period, merchant houses took yagō that functioned as surnames — patterns include a province name + ya (e.g., Kagaya, Echigoya), or an occupational indicator such as Minatoya (from minato, “harbor”).
SystemsYAGO: Your Applications & Growing Ontologies.
As artificial intelligence, semantic search, and knowledge graph engineering continue to scale globally, structural data ontologies form the foundational framework of modern computing. YAGO.com represents the ultimate, authoritative brand anchor for enterprise AI applications, neural network datasets, and global cloud infrastructure solutions.