Yahoo has officially announced the shut down of Yahoo directory on December 31, 2014.
In the beginning days of the web, the Yahoo directory is the product that made Yahoo a big deal in the first place. It was a human-edited directory of websites, organized into different levels.
At the point when Yahoo began, this system was effective, because there weren’t that numerous pages on the web (relatively speaking) and automated search technology to organize websites wasn’t great. That contributed in an enormous way to Yahoo’s popularity over traditional search engines like InfoSeek or Excite that utilized automation. Yahoo had better relevance. You could find what you were searching for.
By 2002, Yahoo understood that Google’s search results were so good that it made a sensational shift and exhibited those as the main listings to searchers at Yahoo. That was effectively the start of the Yahoo Directory’s long, slow-death.
Indeed, in 2003, Yahoo finished the purchase of Inktomi, so it could have its own crawler-based listings. That promoted the inevitable end of its deal with Google. But by then, for Google, it didn’t make a difference. Google had long eclipsed Yahoo as the most popular search engine out there. Eventually, Yahoo even abandoned its own search technology and outsourced to Microsoft for it.
At Search Engine Land, Danny Sullivan does a tremendous job giving Yahoo Directory the tribute that Yahoo itself ought to have given.
