Yahoo Answers
Millions of questions survived as search results—until the place where they were asked was switched off.
Quick facts
- Existence state
- Officially Gone
- Peak stage
- general availability
- Research confidence
- high
- Last verified
What it was
A public question-and-answer platform where users asked, answered and voted across broad subject categories.
Yahoo Answers became one of the web's largest informal knowledge exchanges. Its quality varied wildly, but the mixture of practical help, accidental comedy and ordinary uncertainty made it a distinct public record of internet life.
Existence timeline
Yahoo opens a global community question-and-answer site.
Questions and answers become ubiquitous in web search results.
New questions and answers are disabled.
The public service and its browsable archive disappear.
The question-and-answer service expands across international Yahoo properties and languages.
Why it ended
Yahoo made the site read-only in April 2021 and shut it on May 4. Users were given a limited period to request their own data, but the public archive was not maintained by Yahoo.
Last confirmed trace
Web crawls, screenshots, quotations in other sites and partial community archives preserve fragments of a much larger corpus.
What it left behind
The service demonstrated both the reach and the fragility of user-generated knowledge, foreshadowing later community Q&A while showing what disappears when a platform closes without a public archive.
Questions this archive answers
Why did Yahoo Answers shut down?
Yahoo made the site read-only in April 2021 and shut it on May 4. Users were given a limited period to request their own data, but the public archive was not maintained by Yahoo.
Can old Yahoo Answers still be found?
Web crawls, screenshots, quotations in other sites and partial community archives preserve fragments of a much larger corpus.
How we classified it
The archive unit reached normal public release or operation and is no longer available in its original public form.
The archive unit reached normal public availability, so Arrival Score V1 assigns 100.
Sources & verification
Last reviewed 2026-08-01. Sources are linked so readers can inspect the evidence directly.