Yahoo Starts Scrapping Search Services

Yahoo has announced that two of it’s search engine-powered web services will be officially closed on 31 August 2009:

1. Term Extraction — a service that provides a list of significant words or phrases extracted from a larger document, and
2. Contextual Web Search — a service which allows you to search the Internet for web pages using a context-based query.

The announcement was made by Brian Cantoni of the Yahoo Developer Network in a Yahoo Groups posting. According to the post, both these public-facing sevices share an internal backend data source that is closing down.

Perhaps it’s not surprising that Yahoo is re-evaluating their systems and technologies. Under the terms of the recent Yahoo-Microsoft deal, Bing will replace Yahoo’s search engine. As we reported last week, that is likely to have an impact on other projects — especially those that are related to the search system.

Neither of the discontinued services could be considered ‘high volume’ and few people have complained about their demise. Yahoo are not adverse to scrapping under-performing or obsolete systems (such asGeoCities), but this could be a first step toward a leaner, marketing-led, profit-orientated Yahoo. Projects may be culled, but at least the company will survive.