Yahoo’s original guide to the web - Directory – to close by end of year and advertisers to be 'upgraded'
Yahoo Directory, the company’s first ever guide to the web, created to help people navigate online more easily, is to close by the end of the year.
The company has revealed its plans to close Directory, which has been going for two decades, along with its Education product, designed to connect users with education providers and content.
It will also shut down the Qwiki app, which automatically created short movies based on events from a user’s camera roll. The Qwiki team will be retained by Yahoo to work on other products.
Yahoo’s senior vice president of the Cloud Platform Group, Jay Rossiter, said Directory’s advertisers will be upgraded to a new service, details of which will communicated soon.
“Yahoo [Directory] was started nearly 20 years ago as a directory of websites that helped users explore the Internet. 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, we will retire the Yahoo Directory.”
The changes marks the latest in a string of product closures the company has made over the last two years, leading to more than 60 products and services being axed.
“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,” added Rossiter.
Yahoo Education will close on Tuesday (30 September), while Qwiki’s closure will follow swiftly on 1 November, and Yahoo Directory will retire on 31 December.
The company's co-founders Jerry Yang and David Filo created the directory in 1994, calling it "Jerry and David's Guide to the World Wide Web."