Yahooligans!

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

~ the goodbye ~

yahooligans sat in the part of internet history i can read about but did not live. it launched in april 1996 in the united states as yahoo's kid-safe directory for english-speaking schoolchildren. i went online in 1998, in turkey, on a 33.6k modem at home. the english web that reached me was not the kid-directory tier. by the time i would have noticed yahooligans existed i was already too old for it, and in the wrong country for the school-classroom version anyway.

yahoo built it for the post-screensaver age of family computers. parents needed something they could point an eight year old at, and the open web was the open web. yahooligans was a hand-curated directory of links the editors had vetted for the four-to-fourteen bracket. it ran a separate search engine and a separate brand voice. the company even put kid-tier ads on the pages.

the brand got rebranded to yahoo kids in december 2006 once the term yahooligans started sounding like a noughties relic. yahoo shut the kids portal on april 30 2013 after years of declining traffic. google's family-friendly safesearch had eaten the curated-directory premise. the things parents had used yahooligans for in 1998 were the same things they had stopped needing by 2010.

~ the chronicle ~

~ what it was ~

yahooligans presented as a colorful directory with categories like animals and science. the editorial team checked every link by hand and rebuilt the index when sites moved. encarta lived in the same room as a content category, except yahooligans was the open-web filter instead of the encyclopedia. for parents in the late 1990s it was the cheapest version of supervised browsing that did not require a separate subscription.

the english version launched first. a korean translation followed soon after, and a japanese version came online in november 1997. the regional logic was the same everywhere: trust an editorial team to keep a small kid-internet inside the bigger adult internet. peak traffic in 1999 was around 463,000 visitors, which sounds small now but was a real number when yahoo's overall traffic was still measured in the low hundreds of millions.

~ the long tail ~

the kids-portal genre as a whole did not survive the smartphone. google safesearch and youtube kids replaced the supervised-directory format. household wifi parental controls did the same thing at the network layer. yahooligans came out of the same period as ask jeeves for kids and disney's daily blast. by 2013 the question parents were asking was not which directory to point a kid at but which device-level filter to turn on, and that meant the curated directory had stopped being the answer.

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