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    The Yahoo billboard, relic of the dot com era, to be decommissioned

    The Yahoo billboard, relic of the dot com era, to be decommissioned

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    Yahoo will be retiring its iconic San Francisco billboard, a relic of the dot com era.

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    Yahoo billboard
    Yahoo billboard

    Yahoo's brilliant retro billboard has been a famous fixture of San Francisco since 1999, before internet giants like Facebook even existed, and now one of the search company's few lasting legacies is being torn down. The prominent Vegas-style ad featured the tagline "a nice place to stay on the internet," and had two lines of changeable text which often featured pleasant phrases like "you look cute today." Yahoo even threw a marriage proposal up there at one point. 

    Black Rocket, the ad agency that created the billboard, told The San Francisco Egotist that it wanted to create something distinct from all of the other billboards being put up on Highway 101 in Silicon Valley by internet startups — they ended up putting it on Interstate 80 on the way to the San Fran Bay Bridge, far from all the other startup's ads. The ad reps say that they'll miss it being a part of the fabric of the city, and that Yahoo is losing a physical, grass-roots presence at a time they need it the most.

    Sure, it's only been a little more than a decade since the billboard went up, but it's certainly something of a historical landmark at this point. So will it be saved? We're not sure, but "Yahoo National Monument" certainly has a nice ring to it.