Yedda
» see yedda.com as it lived, on the wayback machine
~ the obit ~
i did not use yedda. in 2007 when aol bought it the q&a site i opened was google itself, and when google did not have the answer i went to a turkish forum like donanimhaber or asked someone on msn. aol the portal was not a thing anyone i knew in ankara was opening in the late 2000s. by then aol had been a fading us-only dial-up brand for most of a decade.
yedda shipped out of tel aviv in late 2005 with a public launch in early 2006. the founding team of five was led by avichay nissenbaum as ceo and yaniv golan as cto. the pitch was semantic-search routing for questions: instead of dropping a question into a generic pool the way yahoo answers did, yedda tried to score who in the user base was most likely to know the answer and route the question to that person first.
aol bought the company on november 11 2007 in its fifth israeli acquisition. price was never disclosed publicly, the press reported it as multi-million-dollar. the yedda site kept running under its own brand for nearly three years after the deal closed, which by acquihire standards was a long stay.
~ the rap sheet ~
| Born | late 2005 in Tel Aviv, public launch early 2006 |
|---|---|
| Peak | briefly the largest organic-traffic source on AOL after the 2010 relaunch |
| Killed | 31 August 2010, the day the brand became AOL Answers |
| Lifespan | about 5 years as a standalone brand |
| Made by | Avichay Nissenbaum and Yaniv Golan with three other engineers |
| Killed by | AOL's parent-brand rollup, then the slow death of every pre-Stack-Overflow Q&A site |
~ what it became ~
on august 31 2010 yedda was wrapped inside a new product called aol answers. the rebrand killed the yedda brand on its three-year anniversary inside aol. for a brief window aol answers became the largest organic-traffic source aol had, the q&a content ranked well in google because aol's domain authority was still high from the dial-up era.
that window did not last. the q&a market by then was already moving toward stack overflow for anything technical and quora for anything cultural. aol answers had no real lane against either. aol itself was about to be sold to verizon in 2015 and the answers product was wound down quietly in the mid 2010s with no formal funeral.
~ the long tail ~
the founders left aol within a couple of years of the acquisition and the team scattered. nissenbaum and golan went on to start lool ventures, a tel aviv vc firm focused on early-stage israeli software. the yedda code and the semantic-routing patents dissolved into aol's content stack and were never extracted.
what aol bought in 2007 was a routing engine that tried to find the right human for a question. what aol shipped in 2010 was a generic q&a site with the aol logo on it. the distance between those two products is the whole story of the deal.
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