How is babby formed? RIP Yahoo Answers – your eccentricity will be missed | Joanne McNeil

After 16 years, the knowledge sharing' site is being closed down - and without much thought about its community

On the internet, warped humour and word salads are commonplace, but the material posted to Yahoo Answers regularly achieved new heights of bizarre. The perhaps best-known question posted to the social knowledge sharing" platform is representative of the particular talents of its user base: how is babby formed? how girl get pragnent?" Anyone with a Yahoo account was free to answer it. The question, misspelling and all, has been a celebrated meme in the decade since it first appeared under the category Pregnancy & Parenting.

Was the question meant to be a joke or posted in a state of sincere befuddlement? I guess we'll never know. After a 16-year run, Yahoo has announced it will shut down Yahoo Answers on 4 May. And with it the head-scratching charms of babby" and countless other posts will go dark.