It was only as recently as 1996 that Yahoo opened their search engine directory in Germany. Now, less than 15 years later, that is shutting down, as well as search directories in several other European countries.
According to AnteZeta:
Yahoo! has closed some of their European directories sometime this year – their Italian and German directory URLs, e.g. http://it.dir.yahoo.com/, are now redirecting to their search page. Others may be impacted but I haven’t checked…
Yahoo stopped updating their German directory in 2006 and the same is probably true for Italy although they never admitted that it was closed to new entries.
So in reality, the directory was only updated for a decade in Germany; we all know that Yahoo had every intention of getting ‘out of search’ as early as 2005, but the complete pulling of EU directories is still a bit of a surprise to many.
WebProNews confirms that:
Apparently since as early as December, Yahoo has been doing this in four countries: France, Germany, Italy, and Spain.
MattMcGee from Search EWngine Land picked up on the tip and asked Yahoo for confirmation – their reply was:
As part of Yahoo!’s ongoing effort to build products and services that deliver the best possible experiences for consumers, we are increasing investment in some areas while scaling back in others. After careful consideration, Yahoo! will no longer offer the Yahoo! Directory service on December 10, 2009 in France, Germany, Italy and Spain. Users in these markets will be redirected to their local version of Yahoo! Search for a superior experience. Yahoo! is focused on innovating in search and continually improving the user experience.
Yahoo added, however, that they had no intention of shutting down the main (US) Yahoo directory, although we can expect those results to continue to be served by Microsoft’s Bing engine under the Yahoo name.