Yahoo has confirmed it plans to close the search engine AltaVista on 08 July 2013, as part of its efforts to focus on specific web properties, making it the latest product to be axed.
The Internet firm acquired the AltaVista technology, index and name upon acquiring ad firm Overture in 2003.
Reports reveal that AltaVista deployed fast computers to return rapid results, which made it one of the top web destinations until 2001 when number of searches executed via Google surpassed it.
Upon being completely decommissioned, AltaVista will start redirecting users to the main Yahoo site.
The AltaVista software was developed by US computer scientists Paul Flaherty and Louis Monier and Briton Michael Burrows during their work in the research labs of Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC).
Yahoo will also axe other products including Axis, Browser Plus, Citizen Sports, WebPlayer, FoxyTunes, RSS Alerts, Neighbors Beta, Stars India, Local API and Term Extraction API.
Overall, Yahoo is planning to phase-out about 60 to 75 products to offer popular mobile apps, while also allow increasing investments in some of marquee properties such as mobile apps for e-mail and weather.
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