What Was Yahooligans?

Yahooligans was a website from Yahoo dubbed "the web guide for kids." It was a collection of hand-selected news, games, jokes, chat rooms, cool sites, and related items that were considered safe for kids.

This kids' web portal was the oldest search engine for finding safe content for children. In late 1999, its Alexa ranking put it at one of the top 1,000 websites on the web.

The Yahooligans website launched in 1996, changed its name to Yahoo Kids in 2006, and (the English version) was officially discontinued in 2013.

There were all kinds of kid-friendly content on Yahooligans. Along the top of the website were the primary categories that you could browse:

• Sports: Daily sports trivia, news from a variety of sports, top sports stories.
• News: Today's Photo, top stories, Star Spotlight, pop news, categories (weather, TV news sites, newspapers, science news, technology news).
• Jokes: A different joke every day.
• Games: Play board games, word games, card games, and more.
• Ask Earl: Submit questions to have Earl answer them for you. Like Dear Abby, but for kids, Earl would answer a question every day of the week.
• Shout Out!: A weekly survey Yahooligans could fill out and check the results for.
• Messenger: A downloadable program, Yahooligans Messenger lets you send instant texts to friends, voice chat, share files, and more.
• Club: Links to various Yahooligan services as well as daily trivia, This Day in History, the celebrity of the month, random links, fun pictures and sounds, etc.

Below the primary menu on Yahooligans was a search engine to quickly find things on the site, and below that even more resources for kids.

Visiting Yahooligans provided dozens of categories of web content that were organized into helpful sections to make finding websites really easy. You could ultimately find kid-appropriate pictures, music, screensavers, homework help, school subjects, references, career information, software, video games, and lots more.

There was even a whole page on Yahooligans that was dedicated to the week's top five coolest websites. Again, hand-selected by the staff, these were relevant for kids. One example page included Cookalotamus and NASA Visible Earth.

Yahoo has never released an official alternative for Yahooligans or Yahoo Kids. However, lots of websites offer the same type of content, you just have to poke around at several to satisfy all that Yahooligans once provided.

There are lots of ways for kids to communicate with their friends and family in a safe way. Here's a chat room for kids and alternative chat apps to Yahooligans Messenger:

• Messenger Kids: From Facebook, this app resembles Messenger but is meant for children.
• JustTalk Kids: Video chat, gaming, and text messaging for kids, built for children as young as 3.
• Skype for Web: Create private, one-on-one video calls and send images and texts without downloading anything to your computer.
• Chatogo: A free chat room made just for kids 13 and older.

With Yahooligans no longer running, kids still have plenty of clean, safe video-watching alternatives:

• YouTube Kids: YouTube offers this for the younger crowd, but there are several other video streaming apps that are made just for kids.
• Popcornflix Kids: One of the best places to watch free kids movies and TV shows, you won't find any inappropriate videos here.
• National Geographic Kids: Find animal videos and videos about Weird But True facts.

Yahooligans used to offer a games arcade with selections including Scooby-Doo. Alternatives include:

• Miniclip: One of several places to find free online games, it includes multiplayer games, action games, puzzle games, and more.
• Nick Jr.: Large variety of online games for preschool kids.
• Disney LOL: High-quality kid-friendly games.

Yahooligans News included interviews and popular news, but there are plenty of other resources for news for kids:

• Newsela: Kid-appropriate news in English and Spanish that can be filtered by low elementary school, upper elementary school, middle school, and high school.
• DOGO News: Current events, world news, news about sports and the environment, and more.
• Scholastic News: Magazine subscriptions for grades 1–6 that you can order to stay up to date on all kinds of news.