Yahoo announced its plan of closing the AltaVista search engine on July 8 which is part of the series of closure scheduled this year.
Yahoo decided to close of its less successful products, services, tools, and APIs beginning July in order to finance the new services that the company is developing. Jay Rossiter, senior vice president of platforms for Yahoo! Inc., announced on a blog post.
AltaVista was one of the most successful search engines during its time before Google joined the game. In 1997, it was said that AltaVista gave Yahoo business revenue of $50 million. It was first shut down in 2011 and revived in 2012. However, Yahoo decided to finally surrender and give AltaVista a rest after almost 15 years in service.
Well, AltaVista is not alone in this retirement. In fact, three other services were retired ahead such as the Yahoo! Axis and Yahoo! BrowserPlus plug-ins and the Citizen Sports portal which served less than three years in Yahoo.
Yahoo! Axis was a browser developed for iOS devices which made its debut on May 23, 2012. It also serves as desktop extension for other services such as Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, Internet Explorer, and Apple Safari.
Another service to retire earlier than AltaVista was Yahoo! WebPlayer which allows users to upload videos and audios and play it as well. It will go dark on June 30 which will then be followed by Yahoo! RSS Alerts feed on July 1.
These tools were actually embedded on AltaVista’s search engine so it is pretty normal that AltaVista will soon be shut down as it loses all its components. AltaVista is quite similar to Google but these tools embedded on its software made it look very Yahoo.
Altavista is not alone on its closure date because Yahoo! Neighbors will also retire the same day. Other scheduled closures are Yahoo! India OMG! on July 25, Yahoo! Downloads on July 31, and Yahoo! Local API and the Yahoo! Term Extraction API on September 28.
