While most of the news from Yahoo has been about the purchasing or innovating of new products and services, they recently announced the elimination of several of their products. The biggest name among the dozen products and services they will be cutting is the search engine, “AltaVista”. Launched in 1995, AltaVista was one of the first search engines and for a time one of the most popular. It truly pioneered the science behind full-text web searches and helped millions of people find information on the Internet in the days when it was virtually impossible to find anything.
On July 8th, 2013 AltaVista will officially be shut down due to its lack of popularity and the focus Yahoo is putting on their other search services. The death of AltaVista has been a long time coming after it changed hands several times over the past decade. Still, for many it will be a sad day when this grandfather of search finally passes.
Joining AltaVista in the junk pile from Yahoo is Axis, which shut down already on June 28th. Axis was a much newer service from Yahoo that attempted to do a variety of things including search, mobile services, a browser and quite a bit more. Unfortunately it did none of them extremely well which helped to ensure it never gained the popularity Yahoo was hoping for.
Full List of Axed Products
Here’s a list of all the products which Yahoo announced would be ending, and the effective date of their demise.
- Yahoo Axis – June 28th, 2013
- Citizen Sports – July 28th, 2013
- Yahoo Browser Plus – July 28th, 2013
- Yahoo WebPlayer – June 30th, 2013
- FoxyTunes – July 1st, 2013
- Yahoo RSS Alerts – July 1st, 2013
- AltaVista – July 8th, 2013
- Yahoo Neighbors – July 8th, 2013
- Yahoo Stars India – July 25th, 2013
- Yahoo Downloads – July 31st, 2013
- Yahoo Local API – September 28, 2013
- Yahoo Term Extraction API – September 28, 2013
For most of these services it was only a matter of time before they were shut down, and it is good to see that Yahoo isn’t holding on to any products just for the sake of keeping them running. Yahoo continues to go through a major shakeup where they are opening new products, buying them from other companies and, as can be seen here, shutting down unprofitable services as well. In the tech world today, there are few companies that are more active than Yahoo which is why so many people are keeping such a close eye on them.
You can see the full announcement from Yahoo HERE.
