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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."
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.
Tablet focused design has ruined the web
I'd take a photo (I'm really sad I think in having a hard copy which I've had in a frame since 1997, on my wall) and upload it, but I'm sure there'll still be a copy online somewhere. It's easy to distinguish between it and the 2007 version, myspace isn't in there. Slashdot's still there in group 9, tho (so's Chips N Dips which is odd, since they're the same site).
Political debates have me rolling my eyes so much I think I got optical whiplash. I should sue. - Foamy The Squirrel
if they allowed downloading their directoy, it'd help NLP and machine learning engineers.
Seriously, no hand-edited directory has been able to keep pace with WWW content for... ten years now? fifteen?
For those who don't mind the lag: DMOZ - the Open Directory Project.
This post contains no rudeness or derision of any kind. All arguments are friendly. Terms and exclusions may apply.
While I haven't used it in years, like most geeks, I do have a soft spot for Yahoo's directory. I remember sitting in a college computer lab after Yahoo launched, visiting every link they included, amazed at this HUGE pile of information available at my fingertips. Funny to think of it now.
The Glass is Too Big: My Take on Things
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.
I'm sure anybody who just paid $299 for a Yahoo Directory Listing will be delighted with this news .......
Yahoo's directories were like gopherhole directories for html. Web searches didn't start to mean much until infoseek came around.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
Keyword search does not help users determine the reputability of a particular site. I can't think of anything better than human curation to assess that, and the result of human curation turns out to be a directory.
Sad to see one of the last vestiges of the Old Web die.
Oh, who am I kidding? The modern version kicks the old one's ass seven ways to Sunday. I've been an Internet user for over twenty years. Yahoo was amazing at the time, but Moore's Law reigns supreme, and thank FSM for that. akebono.stanford.edu, anyone?
If they'd install a decent browser (in addition to the crippled browser that came with their tablets)
That would require buying a second noon-iPad tablet on which to run a non-crippled browser. Because the iOS API lacks support for runtime generation of executable code, all browsers in Apple's App Store are either Safari wrappers or, in the case of Opera Mini, remote desktop viewers.
I kind of miss it, and had forgot it was around.
It was kind of a big influence on me, as I hacked a perl script together to take a netscape bookmark file and turn it into something resembling the Yahoo directory.
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 does Yahoo still do, anyway?
Yahoo directory was almost completely forgotten, but they just had to bring it up again...Now they have an excuse to clean house before lunch is delivered. That's the way the fortune cookie crumbles.
I pay yahoo $19/year for email, that way my emails do not get lost and account deactivated - they used to deactivate a lot in the past, like 8 years ago, after like 90 days of inactivity. Also exchange of consideration, paying them, means they are sort of responsible not to lose my emails, which is complicated territory when you use their service for free. I used to have various email addresses that needed constant updating, at first from my college, then from various dialup isp's, but by the time I switched to cable broadband I've been permanently with a single yahoo email addy, so I don't have to keep changing it on my resume and other various places and accounts every time I move, or change ISP's. It does get spammed a bit, but some of the spam is actually nice, and I like to read it. I prefer yahoo to both Microsoft's Hotmail or Google's Gmail, because Yahoo is kind of an underdog, the power should not get to their heads that much compared to Microsoft and Google who are on top of the world and might think they can get away with any kind of abuse of their customers. Too much power corrupts. Plus I'd like yahoo to stay in business, but sometimes I see difficulty with that, when they blow billions of dollars on very questionable purchases that they later have to write off. I also use them as popmail through Mozilla Thunderbird 1.0.2, so that lessens a bit their responsibility not to lose my emails, especially the old ones. I do have a free account with them too, that I rarely check, except when I have to fill out some bs online form to get an access password, and I know all they want my email for is spam, and that account has like 100,000 spam messages in it. They used to have a classic webmail interface that was awesome and fast, but their new one is absolute crap, it hogs the CPU with javascript, and is very limited on features. Like I can only move a couple emails at a time from a custom folder to the Inbox, so it gets popmail downloadable, which only gets stuff from Inbox. I used to not do popmail, just webmail, and then if you leave stuff in the Inbox it gets autodeleted after a year, while if you create a folder and move important messages there, you can come back to them for years, but that also means you get at least a couple thousand important messages in that folder, and if you want to move those temporarily back to the Inbox, you can only do like 20 at a time, and if you display a lot more per page then the javascript slows your computer to a crawl. It's really poor programming all over the web these days, including yahoo, facebook, twitter, youtube - why the hell do you need a supercomputer to list videos and their images on a youtube page? It's all pisspoor programming with a purpose, to force everyone off classical computers onto handheld smartphones, where they are locked into a very tight and very low feature world. I also have two gmail accounts, but I haven't paid google much yet, except through clicking ads and buying stuff that way, and one time I bought an organic chemistry ebook from books.google.com, that I had no idea it would be DRM'd, only readable with adobe crap running on top of dotnet. I simply refuse to run the megabloat of dotnet crap on my computers, so I'm kinda pissed at Google for pimping DRM. I hate DRM. It means the book is only readable as long as Adobe is around as a business, and as soon as they are out of business, or simply refuse to authenticate my new device, telling me to upgrade or pay them some money, more than I paid for the stupid DRM pdf ebook, I'm screwed with a DRM ebook. That's like Microsoft who might refuse to authenticate new installations of sealed retail copies of XP, telling people to upgrade. They probably haven't sunk that low yet, but it's coming. That's why Windows 2000 is the last windows and Office 2000 is the last Office to the general consumer without activation that will last even if Microsoft is ever gone out of business, except maybe some corporate versions of XP or hacked versions, maybe, if there is a workable hack. So many things that used to
Seriously.. It's called the Enter/Return key. Read up about it..
Email for those with legacy addresses, games, some media that they bought out several years ago (ref: broadcast.com), non-technical people like their news and homepage for some strange reason, and they are still relevant in overseas markets.
Does Chrome for iPad support WebGL? Does it support uploading any data type other than pictures and video to an HTML form containing <input type="file">?
Are you also nostalgic for slavery?
...Yahoo is my shitbox.
This, exactly. I use Yahoo accounts as spam-catchers - I don't even use spam filtering on my 'real' email address, as I don't need it.
...they finally permanently retired the "Web 1.0" interface which was faster, showed more mails and allowed to open them in tabs...
AdBlock and NoScript fix that crap to a large extent. It's annoying to have to click on the 'proceed without updating JavaScript' link every time I log in, and it's annoying to have to temporarily re-enable JS when I want to send an attachment; but the result is an interface that is (just barely) useable, and devoid of ads. If I couldn't turn off all the shitty 'features' that Yahoo has introduced to 'improve' their service, I'd have left long ago - the current stock interface is simply unuseable.
...At least, when I'm logged to Yahoo I'm only logged to Yahoo. No Microsoft account, no Google account (which follows you on Google and Youtube like the plague!)...
I've stuck with Yahoo the same reasons; plus, I find the GMail interface to be not much better than the stock Yahoo interface.
'The Economy' is a giant Ponzi scheme whose most pitiable suckers are the youngest among us and the yet-unborn.
Does ayone actually use that? I never feel lucky enough - the page I actually want is usually halfway down the list.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
There's always AltaVista.
Have gnu, will travel.
I've stuck with Yahoo the same reasons; plus, I find the GMail interface to be not much better than the stock Yahoo interface.
Why are you reading GMail and Yahoo mail in a web browser instead of in a proper e-mail client over IMAP?
Wohoo! I got informative + insightful + flamebait mods for my message! That's one of the mods I've been trying for for years (plus the rare chance to use "for" twice in a row).
Now to see if I can achieve the ultimate: getting "funny" along with flamebait and (informative or insightful). Preferably all four, though I'd wonder if that's actually achievable if you start with 2 points.
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
It should be possible since Flamebait is a -1.
Save Maine's economy: write stuff down. All comments are exclusively my own, not my employer.
Yahoo was, if I remember correctly, my earliest search homepage.. I remember it being much better than Google at the time in finding certain things. Same with Altavista, "Ask Jeeves", and that one that Netscape always wanted you to sign up with (or was that Yahoo?). All are gone now. Awallowed up by that big beast Google. AOLand Geocities too, although they're perfectly preserved in the wayback machine. A directory is sometimes much easier to work with.. for me..and, re this directory, isn't there an application that can copy the entire directory and pages, with correctly resolved links and all? I know there used to be, for Apple OSX (or maybe it was an OS9xx classic app). If anyone knows please comment here.
Writing walls of text without paragraphs is called lacking literary manners. The people I know who do it are the intellectual equivalent of obese people.
I used to rely on Yahoo as my gateway to the Internet and had an email account with them. No longer, they have just become irrelevant.