Yahoo recently announced they will be shifting their focus to what they feel are their core products, which means retiring a few products that no longer fit in with their core offerings.
Yahoo says their core products are search, communications, digital magazines, and video — and shifting their focus to those products will allow them to deliver the best for their users.
Jay Rossiter, SVP, Cloud Platform Group, stated in a release:
At Yahoo, focus is an important part of accomplishing our mission: to make the world’s daily habits more entertaining and inspiring. To achieve this focus, we have sunset more than 60 products and services over the past two years, and redirected those resources toward products that our users care most about and are aligned with our vision.
In the release, 3 out of those 60 retired products and services were highlighted because their closure has the potential to affect the most users. Of the three, two of them are Yahoo Education and Qwiki, which will be closed down on September 30 and November 1 respectively.
The closure that’s getting everyone’s attention is Yahoo Directory, which will be shutting down on December 31. Yahoo Directory started 20 years ago as a directory of websites that allowed people to find what they were looking for on the Internet.
From an SEO standpoint, getting listed in the Yahoo Directory used to be incredibly valuable to a website. Now it doesn’t hold much value, and soon won’t matter at all, but I’m sure we’ll never forget the days of trying to get our sites listed in that directory and the thrill of finally seeing it up there.
From a user standpoint, who can forget the early days of navigating the Internet by browsing sites in the Yahoo directory. Lots of good times had there, which is why it will be sad to see it go.
The Yahoo Directory fell out of favor over time for a variety of reasons. Links from directories became frowned upon, Yahoo lost prominence to Google, and a few other things along the way led to the Yahoo Directory losing its value.
Some say the directory should be preserved because it’s historical, what do you think? Will you miss it?
