Long ago, before AltaVista showed us what a search engine on the web can do, we had indexes, and Yahoo! reigned. That index was built by hand. Paid indexers sifted through web sites and decided under which categories each should be classified. We, the users, could then burrow down through category and sub-category in order to find the specific category we might be interested in, and there find sites that dealt with that specific topic. It worked, though quickly (VERY quickly) it became obvious that building an index such as this on the massive scale needed to categorize the web was totally unworkable.

It became unworkable, or at least unprofitable, for Yahoo! as well. Long ago Yahoo! relegated its directory to a deeply nested spot in its site. Because of this, for a number of years getting to the that directory from the site's main page was a fun, and not particularly easy, exercise. Last September we learned that at the end of 2014 it was becoming impossible, as the company decided to retire that catalog altogether. Many of us saved images of the Yahoo! main page. Fifteen years ago an old one appeared here. And if I'm ever feeling nostalgic, I've got a few more examples saved on my hard drives, and many more can be found on the web.