This article is more than 1 year old

Yahoo! kills! search! APIs!, games! and! Astrology! site!

Bet you didn't see that last one coming as part of ongoing 'Product Prioritization'

Yahoo! has announced it will kill more products.

The precariously-pecunious purple palace has issued a Q1 2016 Progress Report On Our Product Prioritization that says “After a careful evaluation, we’ve decided to make the following product decisions.”

  • As of March 31st, the BOSS JSON Search API and BOSS Hosted Search, as well as the BOSS Placefinder and Placespotter APIs go away. Developers can instead turn to Yahoo Partner Ads APIs if they want to deliver custom search results pages.
  • Various regional media properties are being killed. This means Yahoo! Astrology will close in the UK, France, Germany, Spain and India. Bet you didn't see that coming. Other “regional, genre-specific media properties” will go, so that the company can concentrate on “our four core content areas: News, Sports, Finance and Lifestyle.”
  • Yahoo Games is being axed. The site goes away as of Friday, May 13th, 2016. Yahoo! says it's trying to figure out a “transition plan” so that users who've made in-game purchases aren't left adrift after that date.
  • A service called Livetext has also been summoned out behind the shed with a gun-toting owner. Livetext won't be around come April 1st, but “We plan to incorporate the learnings and features into Yahoo products including Yahoo! Messenger, our core messaging platform.”

Yahoo! recently put itself up for sale and and shuffled the deckchairs on its board. But CEO Marissa Mayer isn't giving up on her own turnaround plan that she told US media over the weekend has three years to run.

The company also likes to remind folks that it has a billion visitors a day and US$4bn a year of ad revenue. That's a lot of zeroes, but Yahoo!'s long struggled to make them add up to a growing and influential business ®

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