Yahoo seems to be in the mood for some summer purging. It has brought under the axe a total of twelve of its products and services, which will phase out by the end of September. The list includes AltaVista- web’s primeval text based search engine and the more recent Yahoo Axis.
To be ousted are the following twelve
Already gone as of 2nd July, 2013 are five products and services. Yahoo RSS Alerts and FoxyTunes were paused on the 1st July. Yahoo WebPlayer went off on the 30th of June while Citizen Sports and Yahoo Browser Plus were laid off together on the 28th of June along with the Yahoo Axis browser plug in. The Axis app though still continues to work.
July will also see the end of Yahoo Neighbors (July 8), Yahoo Stars India (July 25) and Yahoo Downloads (July 31). Yahoo Local API and Yahoo Term Extraction API, won’t wake up when September ends, both set to go off on the 28th of September.
Web’s oldest AltaVista to retire
Come the 8th of June, Yahoo will withdraw AltaVisa- one of the oldest search engines on the internet. AltaVista was rolled out in 1995. A product from Yahoo’s previous days of glory, AltaVista was exceptionally good for those days when the concept of online search was still new. It was the first full text web search engine, a big hit with the online community.
AltaVista then moved from one owner to another till Google came along and established near monopoly in the field of online search engines. And after all the good and bad days that AltaVista has seen, Yahoo is now ready to bid it farewell the coming week.
Also is gone, the relatively new Yahoo Axis.
Last in first out is what happened to Yahoo Axis, the new search engine from Yahoo which came into being May of 2012. It was shut down on the 28th of June 2013- after a 14 month run.
Axis was primary built for mobile devices. Technology soon caught up and with the help of browser plug-ins, Axis became a composite mobile-search-browser product providing smooth and seamless search across multiple platforms and devices. Users will remember that Axis showed highly vivid search results incorporating page previews and vibrant images.
And even though the app continues to work, Yahoo has stopped supporting it, with the browser plug in already shut down on the 28th of June.
Visiting Yahoo homepage for the official Yahoo announcement will be a good idea for current users of the still active services which will be available no more after September. Yahoo has provided some additional details that might come in handy for the current users.