At the end of 2014 Yahoo! closed its historical web directory Yahoo! Directory after about 20 years. This move is part of one of the latest reorganization of the company’s services, the one announced in September 2014. The difference is that this time Yahoo! closed one of the first great services that helped the world wide web pioneers to find interesting websites.

Before Google’s birth there were other search engines but their functionality was limited compared to today’s ones. At the beginning of 1994, Jerry Yang and David Filo created a directory of websites organized into a hierarchy of categories and subcategories called “Jerry and David’s Guide to the World Wide Web”. In March 1994 the the site was given the final name Yahoo!, which was an acronym for “Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle”. In early 1995, the site was moved to the domain yahoo.com which has since hosted the business services.

For some years, Yahoo! was one of the main landmarks of the web and its Yahoo! Directory one of the most important services of the Internet. It was possible to submit your site, choosing from a free and a paid entry. The approval was made manually by company personnel after evaluating each candidate site. In time, the company made several acquisitions but Yahoo! Directory helped its shares to reach very high prices during the first dot-com bubble.

The arrival of Google in the market and the bubble burst marked the beginning of a heavy downsizing for Yahoo! at the beginning of the third millennium. The company maintained its importance more with its portal and some other services than for Yahoo! Directory, which still survived.

The last few years have been difficult for Yahoo! and after becoming the company CEO in July 2012 Marissa Mayer began a series of profound changes. In these two and a half years, various services have been eliminated and this time Yahoo! Directory was axed too.

In fact, Yahoo! Directory was already closed a few days ago and its URL redirects to Yahoo! Small Business, another company web directory. However, if you try to enter the list of sites of a certain category, you receive an error screen. I guess Yahoo! is still working on this service.

Internet’s evolution is extremely fast so the most extraordinary thing is that Yahoo! Directory kept on existing for 20 years with limited changes. I don’t know if now someone will miss it, also because probably only web pioneers remember it as an important service.

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