Yahoo has announced that, as has happened with many other of its legendary services, Yahoo Answers will say goodbye in less than a month, on May 4. The question and answer service has been in operation since 2005, which will make en the moment of his retirement he has exceeded 15 years in service.
With the goodbye of Yahoo Answers not only disappears our ability to ask, but also to search in questions already asked years ago. With this farewell a stage of an Internet is closed where Yahoo Answers is a whole meme even today, used to ask often rhetorical questions on social networks.
One of the great chinks of the old Yahoo!
Yahoo Answers was an important part of the old Yahoo !, one of the great pioneers of the Internet that came to compete face to face with other great technologies. In the specific case of Yahoo Answers, It was a widely used service due to the great positioning it achieved in Google (when your own search engine was already irrelevant).
As we can see in the graph, the maximum peak of popularity of the term that gives its name to the service was in August 2009, and since then it has been falling slowly until practically disappearing. Along the way, the platform left us eternal memes like the one about the question about the band that copies Tokio Hotel called Guns Roses I think.
Today there is some answer that can be found in Google, but most of the references to the answers are on social media as part of the joke, from the reference to when question + yahoo answers was typed in case other users had asked it and then solved with the help of others. As for answering interesting things, the closest thing there is today is Quora, which surpassed the popularity of “answers” a long time ago.
The explanation that Yahoo! has given to close the service is that “the needs of our members have changed“Their priorities also undoubtedly changed when the company was acquired by Verizon Media Group for $ 5 billion.