Yahoo Shuttering Its Web Directory

An anonymous reader writes You may or may not remember this, but before the advent of reliable search engines, web listings used to be a popular way to organize the web. Yahoo had one of the more popular hierarchical website directories around. On Friday, as part of its on-going streamlining process, Yahoo announced that their 20-year-old web directory will be no more: "While we are still committed to connecting users with the information they're passionate about, our business has evolved and at the end of 2014 (December 31), we will retire the Yahoo Directory."

Comments

They Hadn't Already?

[l0ungeb0y]

Last time I saw the Yahoo Web Directory was circa 1999 -- and it was an outmoded next to useless service back then compared to Yahoo search (which was top dog at the time) I had just assumed they'd shuttered it, what with Google kicking their ass so hard that they all but left the Search market to focus on acquiring trendy startups in other areas so they could run them into the same sort of irrelevancy they did with Search.

Yep

[Anonymous Coward]

Tablet focused design has ruined the web

Re:Yep

[jc42]

Tablet focused design has ruined the web

Nah; the people who still use the web haven't seen much of anything "ruined". They see the web they've long seen, just with a larger set of web sites each month, and maybe a few new features in their browsers. It's just the suckers that succumb to the vendors' enticements into their Walled Gardens that think things have changed. If they'd install a decent browser (in addition to the crippled browser that came with their tablets), they'd see that the web is chugging along as it always has, some parts of it good and other parts not so good.

The fact that the marketers have pushed their New! Improved! products for small, portable computers doesn't mean that the old products have suddenly lost their capabilities. It just means that some of the customers have been persuaded to switch to other things that may or may not be any better.

The biggest problem with "the web" from a tablet user's viewpoint is all the old sites built by "designers" who haven't yet learned that their sites need to work on whatever screen the visitor has, including the small screens that so many people are carrying around now. The days are past when a site designer could design only for people with screens as big as the fancy one sitting on the designer's desktop. If your site doesn't work on the small screens, you won't attract many of the billion or so people who weren't using the web 5 years ago, but are now.

This isn't the fault of "tablet focused design"; it's a problem caused by designers' contempt for people with such small, cheap and portable equipment. They've been essentially anti-tablet since before tablets even existed. But they're slowly coming around, as they slowly realize how crappy their sites really are, from the viewpoint of most newcomers to the Internet.

(Actually, the web has always worked a lot better if you consciously avoid sites created by "designers". Those built by people with an engineer's concern for usability have always been a lot more useful, and they tend to work pretty well on tablets, phones, etc. The "designers" usually don't think they look pretty. But people continue to use google a lot, for example, despite its blatant lack of "design". Or maybe because of it. ;-)

Linux is dying thanks to systemd.

[Anonymous Coward]

Hipsters and advertisers haven't just killed the web. They're doing their best to kill Linux, too. They've already managed to destroy Firefox, and GNOME 3 killed the GNOME project for all intents and purposes. Now they've moved on to the core of Linux itself, by forcing systemd on everybody who uses Linux. There's going to be a serious migration away from Linux coming in the near future, I'm sad to say. Some will go to Windows and OS X, with others moving to the BSDs. FreeBSD, whether they know it or not, is going to see a huge resurgence very soon. The FreeBSD leadership will not put up with hipsters their systemd idiocy. It flies in the face of decades of experience. Binary log files? Anyone who isn't an idiot knows that's an awful idea. So FreeBSD will remain one of the last bastions of good operating system design and implementation, while the Linux ecosystem and community burns to the ground.

Web Directories Became Social Bookmarking, etc.

[Anonymous Coward]

I think web directories still exist, they are just slightly less centralized and usually have some gimmick or domain attached. There's still a single authority in charge, but the directories are simply in the hands of the users, which in turn is aggregated per-site.

Examples: Pinterest, Delicious, Reddit (to a point), StumbleUpon, Pearltrees, Kifi, Scoop.it, etc.

Most of these are simply bookmarks or a curated directory. IMO, just about the same thing, only differing on presentation. Amazing how people continually reinvent something and declare it genius. At best, we've seen refinement, more or less efficient UI, and attached search capabilities.

As for those who think full-text search can replace curation, I think you're sadly mistaken. Spend a few weeks really researching search engines, ranking, SEO, language processing, parsers, etc. and you'll find that anything remotely resembling Google's approach is full of problems and challenges. I believe it is impossible to say that one is better than another. I see search as part of a larger whole that includes curation, text, semantic, pattern matching, structural, and other kinds of search techniques combined. It really just depends on the actor's use cases:

Can you quickly find what you're looking for via text search?
Do You know the exact terms and filters for your search?
Do you need recommendations or suggestions?
Do you need to work your way forwards or backwards?
Do you need to pivot on the results?

There are many more questions and answering these influences what is best for you. I think it's a mistake to say directory/bookmarks are useless for these reasons.

What, exactly, does Yahoo still do?

[Animats]

What does Yahoo still do, anyway?

Re:Safari monopoly

[stoborrobots]

Safari wrapper. http://www.howtogeek.com/184283/why-third-party-browsers-will-always-be-inferior-to-safari-on-iphone-and-ipad/ has you covered...