Yahoo Directory

» see dir.yahoo.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

yahoo directory was a hierarchical list. you opened it, you clicked computers and internet, then you kept clicking down the tree, and the bottom of every branch was a flat list of websites that humans had decided belonged in that bucket. that was how you found things on the early web. there was no good search engine, so a list maintained by people was the next best thing.

the first thing i did when ttnet dial-up showed up at home in 1998 was browse yahoo by category. the modem was 33.6k. each category page took twenty seconds to load over the phone line, longer if a banner ad was being delivered. you would not waste those twenty seconds on a junk site, and the directory was filtered for you by yahoo's full-time human editors, who literally read every submitted url and decided whether it qualified for the listing.

by 2002 google had made the directory unnecessary. i kept opening yahoo turkey for the news headlines and the mail, but the directory tab was dead air. yahoo killed it in 2014 because there was no business case for keeping it on, except that for a generation of users it was the way the internet had a shape.

~ the case file ~

~ what it was ~

jerry yang and david filo started the directory as a side project at stanford in early 1994. the original name was "jerry and david's guide to the world wide web." the technical implementation was a flat html file maintained by hand. by the time it was a company in 1995, yahoo had a small editorial team adding sites at industrial pace.

the directory had two listing modes: a free listing for non-commercial sites, eventually replaced by a $299 paid-inclusion fee for business sites and $600 for adult sites. a yahoo editor would read your submission and either accept it or reject it. that fee paid the editorial salaries. it also slowly drained the directory's claim to be the human-curated web, because what it actually became was the human-paid web.

~ how it actually ended ~

in october 2002 yahoo switched its main search results to come from a crawler instead of the directory. that was the moment the directory stopped being yahoo's product and became a vestigial tab nobody clicked. yahoo announced the shutdown on september 26, 2014, and set the date to the end of the year. the homepage took it down on schedule. the announcement post called it "a strategic prioritization."

dmoz, the open-source volunteer-run alternative, hung on for another two and a half years before aol turned it off in 2017. between them they covered the entire pre-google sorting of the web.

~ what got buried with it ~

the directory model assumed a web small enough that humans could file it. that assumption broke around 1999, when the number of new pages per day passed the number any editorial team could process. google did not beat yahoo by being a better directory. google replaced the directory with something that was not a directory at all, and yahoo never figured out what its homepage was for after that.

the part of yahoo directory that survived is a kind of nostalgia for legibility. someone, somewhere, knew where every website lived. when the web was a tree, you could walk it. now there is just a search box, and the tree is something only crawlers see.

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