Yahoo! closes its Directory
Yahoo! Directory was once King, ruling the world of finding stuff you needed well before Google.
Unfortunately for most, Yahoo Directory was well before their time (even mine) but back in the primitive days of the internet you didn’t use Google or other sites to find what you were looking for, you used Yahoo! Directory.
Directories, in those days, were much better than primitive search engines (to use the technical definition) at the time, and much more accurate. Relying on human input to manage and review website submissions directories allowed users to find the information they needed rather than trust a pesky crawler to serve you up a result or two.
What’s slightly depressing though is that Yahoo! haven’t really give Directories a proper burial. They announced its closure in a document named “Progress Report: Continued Product Focus” that just said:
Directory: Yahoo was started nearly 20 years ago as a directory of websites that helped users explore the Internet. While we are still committed to connecting users with the information they’re passionate about, our business has evolved and at the end of 2014 (December 31), we will retire the Yahoo Directory. Advertisers will be upgraded to a new service; more details to be communicated directly.
You can see the full post here but it’s pretty bleak and although I guess they are being transparent it doesn’t seem fair for a page that essentially created them.
Oddly enough, with Yahoo! Directories announcing its closure on December 31st, the influx of traffic after the announcement has taken the site down. You can still load a cached version of the page on archive.org or view the original page back in the 90s.
In 1994 by David Filo & Jerry Yang launched a website called “Jerry & David’s guide to the World Wide Web”, which later became Yahoo!, an acronym “Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle” referencing what it actually did – organise websites into hierarchical order. It was extremely popular next to the pretty terrible choices of InfoSeek or Excite, which used old school crawlers to provide users with information. At one time it rivalled DMOZ until they switched to crawler-based results when its significance took a nose dive.
Did you use Yahoo! Directory? Are you sad about its demise? Let us know in the comments below.