Yahoo To Shut Delicious, Yahoo Buzz amid cost-cutting moves

Yahoo (YHOO) is planning to shut several of its web properties, including Delicious, Yahoo Buzz, MyBlogLog, AltaVista, AllTheWeb.com and Yahoo Picks, as part of its restructuring efforts to save costs and exit unprofitable ventures.

In addition, Yahoo will merge services like Foxytunes, Yahoo Events, Yahoo People Search and Fire Eagle into other Yahoo services. Finally, Yahoo Deals, Avatars, Alerts, Widgets, Greetings, Babelfish, Calendar, Address Book, Notepad, and Message Boards will become features, according to a Yahoo presentation slide that was posted on Twitter.

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, a statement provided by Yahoo said.

We continuously evaluate and prioritize our portfolio of products and services, and do plan to shut down some products in the coming months such as Yahoo Buzz, our Traffic APIs, and others. We will communicate specific plans when appropriate, the statement added.

The latest development comes on the heels of Tuesday's announcement by Yahoo that it will slash about 600 jobs, or about 4 percent of its work force. As of the end of the third quarter, Yahoo had about 14,000 employees.

Yahoo's recent move resembles Google's action in early 2009 that saw the closure of services like Notebook, Jaiku and Dodgeball.

Among various products to be shut down by Yahoo, Delicious remains the most noteworthy.

Delicious, which was founded by Joshua Schachter in 2003, is a social bookmarking web service for storing, sharing, and discovering web bookmarks. The site was acquired by Yahoo! in 2005. By the end of 2008, Delicious claimed more than 5.3 million users and 180 million unique bookmarked URLs.

Other noteworthy services on the chopping list include AltaVista and MyBlogLog.

AltaVista, launched in the mid-1990s, was once one of the most popular search engines but its popularity declined with the rise of Google. Meanwhile, Yahoo developed its own search technology but failed to compete with Google and last year reached a deal with Microsoft Corp.'s Bing search engine to power searches for Yahoo sites.

MyBlogLog, a social network that Yahoo bought in 2007, is a social network for the blogger community that is based in part on interactions facilitated by a popular web widget that many members install on their blog.

California-based Yahoo, which is in a turnaround phase under the leadership of Carol Bartz, has been struggling financially for years and unable to compete with arch rival Google and is being criticized for not launching innovative products.

Meanwhile, Google, Inc. (GOOG) continued to top the U.S. core web search rankings in November, according to the latest data published by Internet data tracking firm comScore.

Google sites accounted for 66.2 percent of explicit core searches in the U.S., almost unchanged from last month. Yahoo was a distant second with 16.4 percent of explicit core searches, followed by Microsoft's Bing that saw 11.8 percent of explicit core searches.

Explicit core search excludes contextually driven searches that do not reflect specific user intent to interact with the search results.

Shares of Yahoo closed Thursday's regular trading at $16.51. For the past 52-weeks, they have been trading in the range of $12.94 to $19.12.