I used my Yahoo mail for over a decade until recently when someone was surprised I used Yahoo mail and exclaimed “People still use Yahoo mail?” I then sharply ported to Gmail but I still use my yahoo account on the side.
Sadly, Yahoo has announced it would officially shut down the Yahoo Directory by the end of the year, December 31 set as a precise date. Most people aren’t familiar with the Yahoo search directory; ironically, it was the product that pushed Yahoo into the lime light. It was also one of the most important search and discovery engines.
As at 1996, the content in the Yahoo Directory was manually uploaded and edited and grouped into categories and you would have to click on many links before you find the information you want.
This seems ambienbuy.net very old fashioned but way back in the 90’s a search directory was a big deal and websites strived to get indexed in the directory. It was like a gold fish amidst other inferior crawler-based search engines that existed as at that time.
Right up till 2002, the Directory was the main thing on Yahoo’s homepage until Google came into the picture with their algorithm which enhanced crawler-based search.
In the light of today’s search engines, shutting down the Yahoo Directory might not be a bad idea, after nearly 20 years of its existence. However Yahoo was rather unceremonious in making the announcement as the brief was casually mentioned in a blog post. Yahoo could have done better considering the product helped shape what is now a multi-billion dollar corporation.