Yahoo! Sign Destroyed

The famous Yahoo! billboard has been be torn down and is gone forever.

The 1950s motel-style neon Yahoo! sign stood as a world-famous landmark at the eastbound approach to the Bay Bridge since the Web 1.0 days, when Yahoo! was the wildest dot-com in the west.

Yahoo! took down the nostalgic billboard after 12 years, leaving the San Francisco Bay Area forever stripped of a glittering part of its identity.

Mourners say dismantling the Yahoo! billboard in San Francisco is equal to burning down the Hollywood sign in Los Angeles.

The outcry in support of the billboard did not stop the vintage sign from being destroyed, erased and forgotten.

As 2012 begins, Yahoo! is now "focused on new and innovative ways to market the company," so the '50s motel theme of the billboard was too backward-looking for a corporation planning to own a chunk of the future.

It is the end of a golden era, not the end of the company.