The end of Yahoo Directory
On 2014. september 26. Yahoo reported that on 2014. december 31. the Yahoo Directory will break up.
Yahoo Directory?
Never heard of it? You're really young.
20 years ago it wasn't Google that helped people to found the information on the internet. Back then there were large "libraries": they collected the most important pages by category and people could explore the net with the help of these lists.
One of the biggest library was Yahoo Directory. It was founded by Jerry Yang and David Filo. The search between the collected pages was based on regular expressions.
It was edited by humans: people reviewed the pages and they put them into categories among with a short description. It was like a huge library. There was no such a technological solution behind it that searched automatically for the relevant pages.
In 1998 Goggle came and proved that the automatic crawling is much more efficient. Talking about a library again: Yahoo was searching for you from a catalogue of the collected books while Google is searching all the books for your relevant keywords.
If Yahoo didn't found anything he offered the answers of other search engines. In 2000 Google offered Yahoo a partnership. Google became the 4. partner of Yahoo. Open Text was the first, AltaVista was the 2nd and Inktomi was the 3rd. In 2002 Yahoo realized that the search results of Google are so good, that this list became the primer list of Yahoo. At that moment the Yahoo Directory started to die.
The Yahoo Directory is dead for about a decade now. Everyone is using the Google search engine. However you can be sure that pages in the Yahoo Directory are trustful and having quality content. In the past 10 years you could still add pages to the directory. If you wanted to register your page for free you had to wait many months, but if you wanted to be in the list in 7 days you had to pay. I don't have any statistics to prove how many people paid for the service but it's probably not a big number. That's why it is pointless to operate the Yahoo Directory anymore.
(Source: Danny Sullivan - SearchEngineLand)
Élesné G. Szilvia
SEO expert
