Yahoo announced on Monday that it will soon send its Answers service to that great trash bin in the sky, bringing about 15 years’ worth of absurd, typo-ridden questioning and equally irreverent answering to an end.
Yahoo Answers will be read-only as of April 20, and fully defunct by May 4, the company said. After that, Yahoo says that typing in its URL will simply take you to Yahoo’s homepage.
In a note to Yahoo Answer’s users caught by the Verge, the company explained that while Answers was once a “key part of Yahoo’s products and services,” its popularity’s waned over the years.
“With you and millions of other users, we built the best place on the web to ask and answer questions on a variety of topics, creating a community of global knowledge sharing,” the company noted, adding that it “could not have been prouder of what we accomplished together.”
On the FAQ page about the announcement, Yahoo offers some handy tips, including where users should go “if [they] have questions in the future,” saying:
Visit Yahoo Search for answers and information from the web. For specific info and resources around the Coronavirus pandemic, please visit our Yahoo COVID page.
Which, sure, might give you some of the answers you’re looking for, but there are so many pressing mysteries that are going to be left unsolved when this service shuts down. We managed to find a sampler of about 2,000 that were featured on the comedy/advice/Yahoo-fan podcast (and one-time TV show) My Brother, My Brother, and Me, but in case you don’t want to sift through the entire catalogue, here are some of our favourites.
- Don’t horses deserve horse-shaped coffins?
- Can you milk Gushers to make fruit juice?
- What to do for a pig themed jazz party?
- Is Long John Silver’s generally a good fish experience?
- Can 38-year-olds listen to Slipknot?
- Cat smelled my vape! Is that OK?
- Can a PowerPoint be sexy? Like a sexual experience?
- What does the moon smell like?
- Is lettuce basically crunchy water?
- Any bands that write lyrics about how difficult the job market is?
I guess the world will never know.