Yahoo is slimming itself down again by axing 12 of its products as part of an ongoing effort to sharpen its focus on services it thinks people need in their daily lives.
The list includes AltaVista, the granddaddy of search engines, and Yahoo RSS Alerts. The other products, including Yahoo Axis, Citizen Sports and Yahoo Browser Plus, are less well known.
"Today we’re shutting down a few products so we can continue to focus on creating beautiful products that are essential to you every day," said Jay Rossiter, executive vice president of platforms at Yahoo, in a blog post Friday afternoon.
Yahoo ditched numerous other products in April, such as Deals and SMS Alerts, touting similar goals around "sharpening our focus".
Yahoo Axis; Yahoo Browser Plus; and Citizen Sports met their fate on 28 June. This was followed by Yahoo WebPlayer; FoxyTunes and Yahoo RSS Alerts today.
On 8 July, Yahoo Neighbors Beta and AltaVista will close, to be followed by Yahoo Stars India on 25 July and Yahoo Downloads Beta on 31 July.
Later this year, Yahoo Local API will close on 28 September, as will Yahoo Term Extraction API.
With AltaVista no more, Yahoo is encouraging users to visit the regular Yahoo Search page. Earlier on Friday, it announced a new feature for setting up search alerts.
Yahoo is highlighting other products to help fill the gaps elsewhere. Citizen Sports may be gone, but Yahoo says people can still get the latest sports news on the Yahoo Sports homepage and stay up-to-date on the go with its mobile Sports app.
In recent months, Yahoo has said it’s focused on products and services geared toward daily habits, such as e-mail, weather, sports, finance and photos.
In some of those areas it’s not doing badly. Yahoo’s new mobile weather app, for instance, has a 4.5-star rating in Apple’s App Store, based on about 4,000 reviews.
During the company’s annual shareholder meeting earlier this week, CEO Marissa Mayer said she likes to think of Yahoo as a big startup.
"We are making investments, and we’re going to continue to make investments, because that’s what drives growth," she said.
Yahoo recently paid more than $1 billion to buy social blogging site Tumblr.
IDG News Service








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