The Yahoo! Directory is Dead

The Yahoo! Directory was one of the better free online directories (rivaling the Open Directory Project), starting in 1994 and finally being decommissioned at the end of 2014. At one time, the page you are reading contained very specific and detailed directions for getting your own website listing in the Yahoo! Directory. This was a good thing in its own right, because people actually used the Yahoo! Directory to find things, but also because (since it was a human-edited directory) Google gave it a lot of credence and ranked websites that were listed in the Yahoo! Directory higher than those that weren't, in their Search Result Pages.

Then Yahoo! Directory started to charge money for reviewing a site to see if it was worthy of being in the Yahoo! Directory. ("You pays your money and you takes your chance.") At first, they charged a one-time $299 "consideration" fee, then that same amount became a yearly fee (trying to find a reliable income stream to pay the editors of the Directory) but it just never did well after they went to the paid model and the bean counters got too involved in trying to make it into a money cow.

Here's the Wikipedia article on Yahoo! Directory, which is a terse eulogy.

Archived copies of the Yahoo! Directory exist over at Archive.org, ranging from 1998 to 2014. One can waste some serious time looking back at it.

It was fun (and useful) while it lasted!