Yahoo Answers

The internet's strangest Q&A community

Shut down
19902026

Yahoo Answers was a community Q&A site that ran for fifteen years from December 2005, producing both genuinely helpful answers and some of the internet's most famous absurd questions. Verizon Media shut it down on 4 May 2021, redirecting the domain to the Yahoo homepage.

Timeline [edit]

  1. 2005
  2. 8 December 2005 Launch
    Yahoo Answers launches in beta

    Community Q&A with points and best answers.

  3. 2006
  4. May 2006 Feature
    Opens worldwide

    Rapid international rollout follows the US launch.

  5. 2017
  6. 13 June 2017 Acquisition
    Verizon completes the Yahoo acquisition

    Answers becomes an Oath, later Verizon Media, property.

  7. 2021
  8. 5 April 2021 Shutdown announced
    Shutdown announced

    Read-only from 20 April; data export offered until June.

  9. 4 May 2021 Shutdown
    Yahoo Answers shuts down

    The domain redirects to the Yahoo homepage after 15 years.

The site through time

Browse answers.yahoo.com as it was, via the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine:

2005 2008 2011 2014 2017 2020 2021 Full archive →

Ownership [edit]

Yahoo 2005–2017 Founded
Verizon (Oath / Verizon Media) 2017–2021 Acquisition, part of the $4.48B Yahoo acquisition Shut the service in 2021

Why it shut down [edit]

Official line: Verizon Media said Yahoo Answers had "become less popular over the years" and shut it down to focus on products that better serve members.

Our analysis: Quora, Reddit and Stack Exchange took the serious questions; moderation neglect left the rest. What remained was beloved mostly as a meme museum, which is not a business.

History [edit]

Anyone can ask, anyone can answer

Launched in beta in December 2005, Yahoo Answers was built on a simple loop: ask anything, let the crowd answer, vote the best answer to the top, earn points. At its height it was one of the largest Q&A communities in the world, localised across dozens of countries, and for years it outranked almost everything on question-shaped Google searches.

The same openness that made it huge made it strange. "How is babby formed?" and its siblings became permanent internet folklore, screenshots circulating decades after they were typed. Serious answers coexisted with homework-dodging students, conspiracy theories and surreal non-sequiturs, and moderation never really kept up.

Outlived by its memes

By the late 2010s the serious questions had moved to Quora, Reddit and Stack Exchange, and the site survived mostly as a nostalgia artifact. On 5 April 2021 Verizon Media announced the end: read-only from 20 April, gone on 4 May 2021, with a brief window to export your data. The URL now redirects to Yahoo's homepage. The memes, of course, are immortal.

Similar projects

MySpace A place for friends 2003–now Google+ The social network everyone was signed up to and nobody used 2011–2019 Digg The front page of the web, until v4 2004–2012 Friendster The social network that came first 2002–2015 Orkut Brazil's living room, built in a 20% project 2004–2014 ICQ The messenger that gave you a number 1996–2024

Sources [edit]

  1. Yahoo Answers will shut down on May 4 The Verge 5 April 2021 [archived]
  2. Yahoo Groups to shut down completely on December 15 The Register 13 October 2020 [archived]

Last verified: 11 August 2026. Spotted an error? Suggest an edit (corrections with sources are reviewed and applied).