After 20 years, Yahoo has decided to kill itself

As part of an ongoing effort to streamline and focus its business, Yahoo today announced that it was retiring its namesake product. In January 1994, Jerry Yang and David Filo, graduate students at Stanford University, created a hierarchical directory of websites, “Jerry and David’s Guide to the World Wide Web.” In March of that year, they gave it the name “Yahoo!,” for “Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle.” In the early days of the Web, these categorized, human-curated Web listings were all the rage. Search engines existed, but rapidly became notorious for their poor result quality. On a Web that was substantially smaller than the one we enjoy today, directories were a useful alternative way of finding sites of interest. As the Web grew, directories became less useful—there was no way they could ever hope to be exhaustive—and Google, in particular, made search engines useful. The directory fell out of fashion. Yahoo kept its directory around, but while its scale is now immense, with hundreds of thousands of sites listed, it clearly no longer captures the interests or imaginations of Internet users today. Over the last two years, Yahoo has shut down more than 60 products and services in a bid to do fewer things better. The directory has escaped previous culls, but has finally been deemed surplus to requirements. It will operate until December 31 before being turned off.