Yahoo Inc. has announced it plans to shut down several “non-core” and “underperforming” web sites as part of its ongoing turnaround strategy.
The affected properties include the search site AltaVista, bookmarking site Delicious, search website AlltheWeb and the online news aggregator Buzz. Word of the changes came from an internal company slide posted online Thursday.
A spokeswoman for Yahoo confirmed the statements made in the slide and said the company is looking at its options for those sites.
“Part of our organizational streamlining involves cutting our investment in underperforming or off-strategy products to put better focus on our core strengths and fund new innovation in the next year and beyond,” the spokeswoman said in a statement.
“We continuously evaluate and prioritize our portfolio of products and services, and do plan to shut down some products in the coming months,” the statement continued. “We will communicate specific plans when appropriate.”
In addition, last week, Yahoo said it was cutting about 600 jobs, or roughly 4 percent of its work force.
The company spokesman declined to say is the layoffs were connected to the elimination of certain web products, but she said the company is continuing to hire people for parts of the business like mobile applications.
After it launched in the mid-1990s, AltaVista became a popular engine until Google’s own search engine and others began dominating the market. Yahoo developed its own web-searching technology but stayed far behind Google in terms of consumer usage. Last year, Yahoo reached a deal with Microsoft and its Bing search engine to power searches on Yahoo websites.