Back in 2000, Google launched its second most important service: Google Directory. It was released to compete with Yahoo Directory, then the most popular web directory around.

By that point Google wasn't yet in a position to gather that volume of data quickly, so they signed a partnership to source listings from Netscape's Open Directory Project and DMOZ. They also layered on something new: automatic ranking of results.

Back then there was real editorial control over the listed sites, as I wrote about in my Italian piece on how Google Directories proved useful.

Most directories, though, lived up to their name a little too literally — ordering results alphabetically from A to Z. And as I learnt over the years, not every site delivered the same quality. So what was the point of a mediocre site starting with "A" ranking first?

Google solved that, mixing the static entries from their partners with their own algorithm.

Now that the web has well over a trillion pages, maintaining a directory is impossible — search engines are the only scalable solution.

So Google once again solved the problem: they shut the service down.

Honestly, who really cares? I hadn't visited Google Directory since 2006, and if it weren't for a few blog posts I'd probably never have noticed it was gone.

Commercial and financial considerations aside, I think Google made the right call — assuming they redirected the engineers behind the directory to another team (probably not Google Labs, which has been shut down too).