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Yahoo Answers is shutting down after 15-year stint

Due to lack of popularity, the most storied web Q&A service will be taken down as the company focuses on its other better-performing services.

Khalisa Zulkiflee

Creative writer and comedian on the side.

Published: 7 April 2021, 1:30 PM

On May 4, one of the internet’s longest-running information treasure troves and its Q&A services will cease to exist.

First started in 2005, netizens have used Yahoo Answers as a platform to get help from other users worldwide, or even ask bizarre questions.

No new content can be uploaded from Apr 20 onwards and users have until Jun 30 to download only content that they have previously uploaded. Users would not be able to download contents that do not belong to them.

The Verizon-owned website left a note for the Yahoo Answers community, saying: “Yahoo Answers … has become less popular over the years as the needs of our members have changed.

“To that end, we have decided to shift our resources away from Yahoo Answers to focus on products that better serve our members and deliver on Yahoo’s promise of providing premium trusted content.”

However, not all is lost. Over the past years, some of the content on Yahoo Answers has been archived safely in Wayback Machine, founded by Internet Archive, a non-profit library based in San Francisco.

Another site that features content from Yahoo Answers is the comedy podcast “My Brother, My Brother and Me”. Since 2010, the podcast highlighted countless questions from the question-and-answer service.