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.
SOURCE : http://www.hngn.com/articles/6567/20130629/yahoo-retire-altavista-search-engine-services-july-8.htm
