Finally, Yahoo has announced that it will officially shut down the Yahoo Directory. Although, most internet users didn't know the Yahoo Directory still existing, for those Yahoo mail users who are not familiar with it, it came along before Google, it is the product that made Yahoo popular. In the early days of the internet, it was also the most significant discovery and search engines.
Ironically, the Yahoo Directory seems to be down because of the surrounding wave of interest on the product, it was organized into different tiers and was human-edited directory of websites. If users wanted to search for websites about games or videos, users would go to the Yahoo directory, click on internet and computers, then video or games.
Now, all seems quaint, although in the early days of the internet, this personally-created practice was a big deal. It was there among the web's inferior crawler-based search engines and web's early randomness. Making a website crawl Yahoo Directory was definitely big. As a matter of fact, in 2002, the Yahoo Directory was still in the center and front on Yahoo's homepage. It overtook crawler-based search, with different support from the algorithms of Google, but there was something wonderful about the discoverability and curation cooked into the Yahoo Directory.
After almost 20 years after the launch of Yahoo.com and the Yahoo Directory as the center of its Internet portal, this last mark of old school Yahoo is closing down. It is logical for Yahoo to shut down Yahoo Directory, although the way it was done, in a very brief explanation on a buried blog post on Friday, it looks so inappropriate of a product that shaped a multi-billion dollar firm, Yahoo.
In the entire land of Search Engine, Yahoo does a very good job in paying tribute to Yahoo Directory that the company itself should have given. The company offers historical context for the value of the directory, which as they aptly claims, was
"once the Internet's most important search engine."
Yahoo was launched in 1996 and was when that Yahoo Directory entered the site before Google, Facebook and Twitter were born. Yahoo Directory will be shut down on December 31, 2014.
