They were useful for navigating the web between 94 and 96 or so. They then proceeded to acquire a few sites which were also useful at one point in time, (Flickr et al), although they do seem pretty good at driving such sites into irrelevancy.

Their public finance pages are the best I have found (until some time later this year when we release, that is)

Yahoo! Pipes is extremely useful.

Hell yeah. Very cool service.

I mainly use it to correct strangeness in sites' RSS offerings. For example, BBC iPlayer offers feeds for channels but not per show (?!), and Penny Arcade doesn't offer a feed for just the comic without the news posts.

I did try that and found it not very consistent; plus you never know when it's going to be discontinued.

I actually like Yahoo News for some reason. Some of the stories they feature in the front page makes me want to click through and read it when I'm bored.

I'll second news.yahoo.com. It's better than Google's layout, and you can dive right into subregions of the world to get more specific world news.

Also, nba.yahoo.com has a better layout than nba.com itself for following stats and even following the games live (a really well-done java applet).

Finally, I've been playing around with switching search engines from Google to something else, and I found for most tech stuff, Yahoo! actually has more relevant search results than Bing or DDG.

it's funny you mention this. yahoo actually got several maching learning algorithms in place, constantly adjusting headlines and summaries to get a higher CTR on the articles. i've visited the site occasionally and noticed and immediate desire to click on some of the links. Source: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/09/23/yahoo_core_personali...