04/06/2021 15:40
Clarín.com
Technology
Updated 04/06/2021 3:40 PM
The forums website
Yahoo Answers (Yahoo Answers)
, famous for allowing users to ask and answer questions in a community, announced its final closure after 16 years online.
It will be terminated on May 4.
The platform had been in operation since 2005, when it was created by then-Internet giant Yahoo!
(now owned by Verizon), and
had become one of the
most popular
question
and answer
portals
in its early years of existence.
The central idea of the page
was very simple but, for the time, very effective
: Yahoo users posted questions of all kinds and a community was built around the answers, which could be selected from among the best.
The service became a very useful way of spreading knowledge, although also because of the striking,
ridiculous and funny
of some questions, on more than one occasion it became the butt of jokes.
Yahoo and its old "home": one of the forerunners of the internet.
Yahoo photo
At present, perhaps the most similar system is
Quora,
although it has a more academic profile.
Now, the main page of Yahoo Answers has begun to show its users a message in
which they warn of the end of the service
, which will be final on May 4 in Eastern time in the United States.
The functions of the page will be reduced before its closure and from
next April 20 it will not be possible to publish new questions or answers
, and the service will remain only in read mode.
In a Q&A document, Yahoo Answers explained that their users
will be able to download all their content
-l
Q&A list, questions, answer list, answers and any images - for a limited time, until June 30.
This process can take up to 30 days.
The rationale for the closure has to do, according to the company, with the fact that it is used little and nothing, despite the fact that Google's results continue to show
links associated with the service among its first results.
Yahoo explained that the closure of its forum will not change the user accounts of Yahoo or
any other of its services.
Why was it revolutionary
Yahoo Answers.
Yahoo Image
Yahoo Answers was available in
12 languages
and connected users around the world for 16 years.
In Asia it was called
Yahoo Chiebukuro
, a service that allowed the use of non-Latin characters precisely.
In Korea, Taiwan, China and Hong Kong it was called
Yahoo Knowledge
.
Yahoo, created by Jerry Yang and David Filo, had absolute supremacy in Internet history from its inception
in 1995 until around 2005
, when Google began to follow its heels.
Yahoo!
Answers was created to replace
Ask Yahoo!
, Yahoo's old question and answer platform, which was discontinued in March 2006.
And the methodology was very simple: as long as the community's norms were not violated,
absolutely anything could be asked.
The service was integrated with the Yahoo Messenger ID, the company's messenger that also
ended up being displaced, in this case, by Microsoft's MSN Messenger.
The answers could have qualifications and the ones that were marked as
"best answer"
were the ones that were seen at the top of everything.
This had a double objective: to reward those who contributed to the community and to facilitate
the work of finding the best response to the user.
During all that time Yahoo had various products that were conquering the web in the
golden age of "portals"
: pages that people chose as the start of their browser where they not only had a search bar as happens today with Google, but news and other services.
There, social networks began to appear, in an embryonic way.
Yahoo Answers was a key cog in that story.
And
many users who use it today are already regretting it:
The lament of the users.
SL
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