Yahoo! has closed some of their European directories sometime this year – their Italian and German directory URLs, e.g. http://it.dir.yahoo.com/, are now redirecting to their search page. Others may be impacted but I haven’t checked. At least the Italian directory is still in Google and Yahoo search results but not those of Bing. Yahoo Site Explorer also shows cached pages from the Italian directory with the copyright 2010; unfortunately Yahoo! doesn’t display a cache date. Other Yahoo! directories, such as the US and UK versions, are still open for business.
Figure 1: Yahoo! Directory in Italy, once upon a time
Yahoo Directory closures not really a surprise
As I’ve previously noted (see question 3), Yahoo stopped updating their German directory in 2006 and the same is probably true for Italy although they never admitted that it was closed to new entries. With Yahoo’s de-emphasis of search, and the long decline in human edited directories overall, these directory closures can’t really be much of a surprise. Yet as one who remembers using the Yahoo! directory before DEC’s Altavista, this is quite a search milestone. I might not miss you Yahoo! directory, but your passing has been noticed.
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Sean Carlos is a web marketing consultant & teacher, assisting companies with their Search (SEO + PPC = SEM), Social Media & Digital Media Measurement strategies. Sean first worked with text indexing in 1990 in a project for the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Since then he worked for Hewlett-Packard Consulting and later as IT Manager of a real estate website before founding Antezeta in 2006. Sean is an 
The problem with their directories is that they used to charge for there service. Nobody wants to pay to be in a directory unless it creates more money.
I remember that in 2003, i heard the most was Yahoo directory, especially businessmen. But this situation had changed since SE come out, such as google, bing, they can help people make more money than Yahoo directory.