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.

Re:They Hadn't Already?

[Moridineas]

I don't think Yahoo was ever top dog search?

I remember switching from Altavista to Google sometime around 98/99. WebCrawler before that? Yahoo is one of those companies I've never understood why people used their products. Or, for that matter, how they're still around today.

Re:They Hadn't Already?

[Immerman]

I wonder what baud a 28.8Kbps modem ran at? By that point I think they had shifted to phase modulation instead of ampltude modulation, and were probably using 2-3 bits per symbol (90* or 45* phase shift increments), which would put the signal rate at either 14400 or 9600 baud. Of course you couldn't go *advertising* it that way and expect to sell upgrades, which is no doubt why modem labelling changed from baud to bps at around that time.

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. ;-)

Re:Yep

[Zontar The Mindless]

Bingo. One of the Web's biggest problems has always been "it's just like print" types who create static layouts that fit only within the biggest screen they can lay hold of, and the rest of the world be damned.

downloadable content

[Champaklal]

if they allowed downloading their directoy, it'd help NLP and machine learning engineers.

Nostalgic about oil lamps?

[arielCo]

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.

Re:Nostalgic about oil lamps?

[dbc]

Yahoo wasn't keeping up when it was brand new. I remember using Yahoo when Mosaic, compiled from sources by yourself, was the recommended procedure for installing a web browser on my workstation at work. Yahoo wasn't keeping up even at that time.

Soft Spot for Yahoo Directory

[LetterJ]

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.

Re:Soft Spot for Yahoo Directory

[Trenchbroom]

I know that for almost everyone else (women, kids, old people, non-nerds) the web is a billion things. But for me (and I suspect for many of my fellow male, older nerds), the internet is defined as a source of knowledge, far beyond being a music/movies/sex/friends/whatever provider. And it's all because of a similar experience to you the first time I sat down at a computer in college and tried the World Wide Web for the first time.

RIP

[demonlapin]

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?

Safari monopoly

[tepples]

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.

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...

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:Webmail

[xushi]

Seriously.. It's called the Enter/Return key. Read up about it..

Re:Nostalgia gone awry

[Immerman]

Why be nostalogic? Slavery's still going strong, even here in the supposed land of the free. Not nearly so openly as it once was, but human trafficking is still a major issue that ruins a lot of people's lives.

And that's even before you consider things like wage-slaving and non-human slavery (there's a reason they call it "breaking" a horse - that's generally exactly what you have to do to its spirit)