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SoylentNews
from the do-you-know-anyone-who-uses-it? dept.
As part of an ongoing effort to streamline and focus its business, Yahoo today announced ( http://yahoo.tumblr.com/post/98474044364/progress-report-continued-product-focus ) that it was retiring its namesake product at the end of the year.
In January 1994, Jerry Yang and David Filo, graduate students at Stanford University, created a hierarchical directory of websites, "Jerry and David's Guide to the World Wide Web." In March of that year, they gave it the name "Yahoo!," for "Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle."
In the early days of the Web, these categorized, human-curated Web listings were all the rage. Search engines existed, but rapidly became notorious for their poor result quality. On a Web that was substantially smaller than the one we enjoy today, directories were a useful alternative way of finding sites of interest.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 27 2014, @10:35PM
And that, in a nutshell, is the mystery of humanity. How can we have come so far, learned so much, traveled to the stars and built an amazing knowledge engine that can put all of man's knowledge at your fingertips… and use it for advertising.
The number one trending story on Yahoo is about vagina cookies. I'm not even kidding.