Yahoo! Category

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

~ the obituary ~

Yahoo! JAPAN opened on 1 April 1996 and the directory opened with it, holding somewhere around fifteen thousand sites. It was a tree. You picked a branch, then a narrower branch, and at the bottom there were links with one-line descriptions written by somebody who had actually looked at the page. The staff who did that reading were called surfers, which is a job title that stopped existing everywhere else long before it stopped existing in Tokyo.

By the time it closed there were about 800,000 sites in the tree. Getting into it mattered commercially in Japan for most of the 2000s, enough that Yahoo sold an express lane: Yahoo! Business Express charged you for a guaranteed review rather than a guaranteed listing, which is a distinction a lot of buyers never quite absorbed. That product stopped selling on 31 July 2017, which is the real tell for when the decision had already been made.

Yahoo announced the closure on 29 June 2017 and shut the directory on 29 March 2018, with a statement saying crawler-based search had become the mainstream and the directory had finished its role. The American Yahoo Directory had already closed on 31 December 2014. The Japanese one outlived it by three years and three months, which means for a while the last serious hand-built commercial web directory in the world was a Japanese one.

I came online in 1998 on a 33.6k modem and the directory was simply how you found out that a thing existed. Not this directory, the other one, the .com one, in English, from Ankara. Both of them worked the same way and both of them taught the same habit: you did not search for a site, you walked down the tree to where somebody had already put it.

~ the case file ~

~ the surfers ~

The surfer was the whole product. A submission came in, a human read the site, and that human decided whether it went under entertainment or under media and news, and where inside that. It scaled badly on purpose. The tree was only worth anything because a person had made a judgment call about every branch of it, and a person can make a few dozen of those a day.

That is also why the category structure aged so strangely. Branches created in 1997 for technologies that died in 2001 were still sitting there in 2018, because nobody had a reason to go back and prune them, and pruning is not a task anyone gets promoted for.

~ the slide ~

Google's crawler did not so much beat the directory as make its output redundant. Once a machine could read every page on the web every few days, a hand-written list of eight hundred thousand entries was a very small, very slow subset of a very large fast one. The directory's remaining value in Japan was reputational: a listing was a signal to other machines that a site was real.

Then Google stopped treating directory listings as a signal, and the reason to pay for Business Express evaporated. The paid lane closing eight months before the free service is the sequence you would expect if the revenue went first and the rest followed on a timetable.

~ what got buried with it ~

What the closure took away was not the links. It was the only surviving large-scale record of how a group of paid professionals thought the web should be divided up, updated continuously for twenty-two years. DMOZ had the same thing built by volunteers and it went dark in March 2017, twelve months before this one. Within a single year the web lost both of its serious attempts at a human table of contents.

Nothing replaced them, because nothing needed to. Search works. But there is no longer any document anywhere that answers the question of what categories the web is made of, and the last two people who had an opinion about that were a Tokyo surfer and an unpaid DMOZ editor.

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