Nearly 20 years ago, the Yahoo Directory was born. With a hand-compiled list of websites, it was something revolutionary for its time, and was certainly the industry leader for a number of years. The only site to overtake Yahoo! has been Google, who celebrated 16 years yesterday.

Yahoo’s statement read: “While we are still committed to connecting users with the information they’re passionate about, our business has evolved and at the end of 2014 (December 31), we will retire the Yahoo Directory. Advertisers will be upgraded to a new service; more details to be communicated directly.” This is the end of an era.

When the directory first came out, it was SEO 101 to be included. If you were not listed there, your business wasn’t going anywhere. Everyone turned to the Yahoo Directory for their every need and every marketer made it their aim to be listed. Although today it is not used as much, since we have regular search engines that don’t depend on people manually inputting websites, it will always be remembered as the father of the search engine. 

So, make sure to take one last trip before December 2014, when it will officially be shutting it’s doors.