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Yahoo Directory, once the center of a web empire, will shut down at year's end

Yahoo Directory, once the center of a web empire, will shut down at year's end

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Yahoo Directory, a site that was once the center of Yahoo's internet dynasty, is being shut down at the end of the year. However, unless you've been using the internet for a couple of decades, you've probably never heard of the site. Let's hop in an internet time machine and set the dial back to 1994, when Jerry Yang and David Filo founded Yahoo. The site, "Jerry and David's Guide to the World Wide Web," was little more than a hand-curated list of sites on the internet, sorted by category.

At the time, fast, efficient, and accurate search engines like Google were just a dream — navigating the internet relied on such lists of interesting websites. The site was later named Yahoo (an acronym for "Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle," if you can believe it) and Jerry and David's List — known as Yahoo Directory — grew and grew. But eventually time and high-quality search engines left handmade lists like Yahoo Directory behind. But the subsite somehow lived on, far beyond its useful life. Now, some twenty years later, a new Yahoo intent on streamlining and focusing its services is finally giving Directory the axe. The site will live on until December 31st of this year, when Yahoo will flip the switch for good.

Yahoo homepage 1995