An Ode to Yahoo! Answers: The Web's Hilarious Yet Precious Archive

As the page is headed for a final shutdown on May 4, here are some nostalgic moments to commemorate its run.

Yahoo! Answers will permanently shut down on May 4.

Image: The Quint

The year is 2010. Summer vacations are on, and I'm relentlessly fighting with my older brother to let me have my share of the time on our computer. My mother, the reluctant judge who somehow always found herself in the middle of our fights finally settles the debate and rules in my favour. With a smug grin on my face, I sit down to turn on our computer, an old LCD screen that took forever to boot. This wasn't the age of 5G and i9 processors yet, so I wasn't complaining.

As I moved the mouse, the animated screensaver went off, and a new tab popped on the screen. Yahoo! Answers was the first webpage that was open, and as a 10-year-old, my interests were piqued.

Initially, I thought browsing was only meant for grown-ups; them using it to check their emails was the only legitimate use I saw for the internet. But with Yahoo! Answers and their messenger, I'd finally found something for myself to do on the internet.

Yahoo! Answers was special not only because it was one of the first question-answer format pages from its time, but also because it was our very first introduction to the .com world, a completely new avenue that paved the way for the internet for most of us.

Since it was so new, people asked without any inhibitions, got answers that were free of judgement, and trolling wasn't even a thing then.

Because of this, the kind of questions you find on Yahoo! Answers are very unique to their own site, not easily found on competitor sites like Quora, that came in much later.

You could ask something as simple as "How to use the internet", just like this user did, and also found someone to answer it with the utmost sincerity. Oh, how we miss those days when the internet wasn't a judgemental, condescending place!

However, if you think this makes Yahoo! Answers a goody-good place that's not fun, let me correct you. As the popularity of the site picked up, Answers quickly evolved to a place where discussions about war, politics, and philosophy became rampant.

As an ode to the growth of the site, we tried looking back at some entries that, for us, easily summarize the memory of Yahoo! Answers, and how, in its own unique way, it became this hilarious yet precious repository of the internet’s past.

For instance, look at this person's hilarious dilemma:

Or this guy... Honestly, I just hope these people finally found their songs.

I'm sure everyone can relate to this at some point...

Questions for the intellectuals right here...

Cannot stop obsessing over this answer.

In a parallel universe...

Printers... never work when they're needed the most, am I right?

Should probably get this checked...

Technical difficulties with a whole new twist:

I feel bad for laughing at this...

Taking down the establishment one simple question at a time

Chandler Bing... is that you?

Yet another loophole in the DCEU...

Women: Overcompensating since time immemorial

Yahoo! Answers will become a read-only website from April 20, and will finally shut down on May 4.