Yahoo killing off 12 products including AltaVista, RSS Alerts, Axis, & more

Hasta la vista, AltaVista. Yahoo has decided to shut down that old-school search engine as well as 11 other products.

Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer previously committed the company to refining its products and making sure it focuses resources on the best ones. For example, she said in February that she wanted to kill off 80 percent of the Yahoo’s mobile apps.

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And now the company is acting further on its promises. Notably, the biggest name on the list is AltaVista, which was one of the most popular search engines on the web in the late 1990s, but it fell out of favor once Google came on to the scene. In 2003, Overture — the company that owned AltaVista at the time — sold it to Yahoo. And now Yahoo is finally putting it down and recommending people to use Yahoo search.

Other products being shut down include RSS Alerts (interesting timing with Google Reader dying this weekend), the browser plug-in Axis, and the FoxyTunes music/media player.

Here’s a full list of products being shut down, their closure dates, and additional details:

Yahoo Axis (June 28)

If you installed the browser plug-in, it will no longer work. If you downloaded the app, it will continue to work, but won’t be actively maintained. We encourage you to use the Yahoo Search app for iOS and Android.

Yahoo Browser Plus (June 28)

To see all of our current developer offerings, please go here.

Citizen Sports (June 28)

You can still get all the latest sports news on Yahoo Sports, play fantasy sports like Fantasy Football and stay up-to-date when you’re on the go with our new Yahoo Sports app for iOS and Android.

Yahoo WebPlayer (June 30)

If you’re a publisher and currently using Yahoo WebPlayer on your site, after June 30 the Yahoo WebPlayer won’t load. Your users will continue to be able to play media files using native browser support. You may wish to locate and remove the following line in your code:

FoxyTunes (July 1)

To see the latest in the music world, please visit Yahoo Music.

Yahoo RSS Alerts (July 1)

To continue to get the latest content that you care about, you can subscribe to Keyword News alerts at our Yahoo Alerts and receive them via email.

Yahoo Neighbors Beta (July , 2013)

You can visit Yahoo Local Search to find out what’s going on in your neighborhood.

AltaVista (July 8)

Please visit Yahoo Search for all of your searching needs.

Yahoo Stars India (July 25)

To stay up on all your favorite celebrity news, check out Yahoo India OMG!

Yahoo Downloads Beta (July 31)

Yahoo Downloads will no longer support third-party downloads. It will continue to offer downloads of Yahoo products like Yahoo Toolbar or Yahoo Messenger.

Yahoo Local API (Sept. 28)

As part of this shutdown, all Yahoo Local API documentation will also be removed from the Yahoo Developer Network portal.

Yahoo Term Extraction API (Sept. 28)

We are eliminating direct access to the Yahoo Term Extraction API and as of Sept. 28 will require developers to go through YQL. We encourage all existing users of the Term Extraction Legacy API to migrate to YQL requests by September 28. You can use the YQL forums for any questions you might have about migrating to YQL. If you are already using the Term Extraction API via YQL, you don’t need to take any action.