We archived Yahoo! Answers

Yahoo! Answers has been a staple of the internet for decades. On May 4th 2021, the popular site was shut down forever, taking 80+ million pages off the internet in the process. Quant attempted to take a full snapshot before that happened.

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Wait, what?

Yahoo! Answers has been a staple of the internet for decades. On May 4th 2021, the popular site was shut down forever, taking 80+ million pages off the internet in the process. We attempted to take a full static snapshot before that happened.

When tech giants create sites like Yahoo! Answers, they build massive communities of loyal users. Their success is built on content generated by these users, and the perception is that they will last forever. In reality, once they've served a particular purpose (or no longer make business sense), they'll tear them down without hesitation.

Yahoo gave less than a months notice to their users, gutting a community and barely giving archivists time to react.

Where is it?

You can access the main archive at https://answers.quantarchive.com. Along with the primary site we also kept international sites:

How much is missing?

Plenty. There was simply too much historic content to retrieve in such a short time frame, however we managed to capture the majority of recent (2020/2021) questions, and a very large portion of historic (2006 through to 2019) data.

Content that loads via AJAX request (e.g "Show more answers" etc) will not load.

We did manage to capture 10s of millions of pages which equates to terabytes of data; but it's hard to estimate what percentage of the total this represents.

What's next?

While there are millions of pages stored in our archive, it's hard to surface without search. Provided there is interest, we could add searchability and filtering to the offering using our Quant Search solution.

If other archivists have managed to capture content we're missing, we'd love to collaborate to build a more complete snapshot - feel free to reach out! ❤️

About QuantCDN

Quant is a global static edge; a CDN combined with static web hosting. We have built easy to use tools to snapshot or archive sites easily. We used those tools to take a snapshot of Yahoo! Answers before it fell off the face of the planet.

We provide solutions to help make WordPress and Drupal sites static, as well as support for all popular static site generators.

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