Yahoo Answers Will Be Wiped From The Internet Next Month

Yahoo! Answers is shutting down in a month's time after nearly sixteen years online.

The corporate outfit once known as Jerry and David's Guide to the World Wide Web announced its decision on Monday by posting a note at the top of its now-doomed Q&A website.

Users have until April 20 to pose new questions and provide answers for queries. From May 4, Yahoo! Answers will officially disappear from the internet, though we wouldn't be surprised if someone tries to make an unofficial mirror of it all.

If you can’t bear to see your content go up in smoke, you can request to download all the text or images you’ve posted to the service until June 30. You won’t be given other people’s questions or answers, however.

While Yahoo! Answers has been around for the best part of two decades, similar platforms, such as Quora and Reddit, have cropped up to challenge the internet old-timer.

In a message to its loyal fans, the Yahoo! Answers team admitted it was getting rid of its site since it was getting less and less eyeballs.

“While Yahoo! was once a key part of Yahoo!’s products and services, it has become less popular over the years as the needs of our members have changed," they wrote. "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."

Maintaining free-for-all Q&A sites is difficult; trolls, flame wars, and misinformation can saturate a service. Yahoo! Answers' most-popular recent questions are tedious political point-scoring attempts disingenuously or nakedly posed as queries. It's the web equivalent of trash-talking in a dive bar in the sweaty hope of getting into a punch up.

Now that netizens have fled to better search engines, portals, email services, and what have you, Yahoo! is viewed as more of a relic these days than the one-stop-shop of the internet it used to be. The company, now owned by Verizon, has been winding down its properties, notably axing Yahoo! Groups last year. ®