Children, gather ’round. When I was a boy, we didn’t have Digg. We didn’t have Slashdot. When we wanted a big traffic rush, we had to walk eight miles in the snow to Yahoo Picks — Yahoo Picks Of The Week & Picks Of The Day — and we liked it. But now, Yahoo Picks is gone.

Bow your head to the news that TechCrunch highlighted today. Let a tear or two flow down your face as you read the formal announcement:

We’re sorry to say that Picks has stopped updating. After 12 years, we’re moving on to new projects and fresh ways of highlighting cool sites across the Web. We’ll still be here in different guises, like on Yahoo! Green writing about eco-friendly sites, or Yahoo! Answers calling out cool questions, or on the Yahoo! Buzz Log, sifting through what people are searching for online. And the Yahoo! Picks archive will remain available to anyone who wants to wander in. Thanks for your support and attention all these years.

Here’s the first Yahoo Picks Of The Week (I believe), from August 1995. Note that there was a parody of The Spot being highlighted. Kids, "The Spot" was what we had for entertainment before YouTube came along with Mentos & Coke.

And aw, here’s my Access Disk Provider Report being a Yahoo Pick for February 2, 2005.

Think back as well to NCSA / Netscape What’s New, which was a predecessor to Yahoo Picks, highlighting key sites from June 1993 through February 2005.

Those were the days, my friend….

Related Topics: Stats: History | Yahoo: Other

About The Author: Danny Sullivan is editor-in-chief of Search Engine Land. He’s a widely cited authority on search engines and search marketing issues who has covered the space since 1996. Danny also oversees Search Engine Land’s SMX: Search Marketing Expo conference series. He maintains a personal blog called Daggle (and maintains his disclosures page there). He can be found on Facebook, Google + and microblogs on Twitter as @dannysullivan. See more articles by Danny Sullivan