back to article Yahoo! kills! search! APIs!, games! and! Astrology! site!

Yahoo! has announced it will kill more products. The precariously-pecunious purple palace has issued a Q1 2016 Progress Report On Our Product Prioritization that says “After a careful evaluation, we’ve decided to make the following product decisions.” As of March 31st, the BOSS JSON Search API and BOSS Hosted Search, as well …

  1. Captain DaFt

    A sad day indeed.

    "As of March 31st, the BOSS JSON Search API and BOSS Hosted Search, as well as the BOSS Placefinder and Placespotter APIs go away."

    After this month, developers will no longer be able to Yahoo! search... like a BOSS!

    1. allthecoolshortnamesweretaken

      Re: A sad day indeed.

      Developers? What developers? Yahoo! is a bloated corpse drifting in the water, sometimes fooling the odd casual observer into thinking it is still alive, mistaking the bobbing up and down in the ripples for voluntary movement. And the grieving relatives start gathering at the shore, discussing ways of reeling in the body. Because there is still that lottery ticket with the winning number in the corpse's wallet.

  2. tempemeaty

    Oh well. ¯\_(シ)_/¯

    Can you imagine Google telling the world they're ending their search engine.

    As bad as Google search has become, I would think now is the time to go all in on search and try to take the top spot away from Google. Oh well.

  3. a_yank_lurker Silver badge


    Has the date for the funeral been announced?

    1. Mark 85 Silver badge

      Re: Date?

      Not yet, but then I'm not sure they've ordered the coffin yet. Something about "how big a coffin do we need?".

      1. breakfast

        Re: Date?

        It's not the size so much as the jaunty angle that is important.

      2. admiraljkb

        Re: Date?

        > Something about "how big a coffin do we need?"

        followed by, "if we wait 6 more months, we can save even more money with a much smaller one"

        Yahoo! seems to be getting circled increasingly by vultures, but those vultures all appear to be waiting for the value of the company to be much closer to zero to save on acquisition costs. (ala its only "mostly dead", so they're going to wait it out a little while longer)

        1. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: Date?

          Yahoo! (The! Good! Parts!) (TM!) is already open-source anyway, and AFAIK the programmers responsible for it are long gone. What assets does the company still have? I suppose you could sell the chairs and desks on craigslist and convert the buildings to hipster loft flats. Purple Palace Apartments. Or Casinos... Trump could do it if he loses the election and still has a few million left.

  4. Francis Boyle Silver badge

    "Bet you didn't see that coming"

    It was on the cards.

  5. Jan Hargreaves

    A billion VISITORS a day. Yeah... pull the other one...

    1. Pascal Monett Silver badge

      Well they didn't say a billion unique visitors a day.

      1. Jim 43

        I'd love to know what percentage of their searches are for 'google'. There have to be tens, maybe hundreds of thousands that simply don't know they can change their search engine.

  6. toughluck


    Yahoo Games is being axed. The site goes away as of Friday, May 13th, 2016. Yahoo! says it's trying to figure out a “transition plan” so that users who've made in-game purchases aren't left adrift after that date.

    Bit too late for that, isn't it? Announce your plans to world+dog and negotiate after that? Everybody knows you have no choice now and will accept any scrap thrown at you. You don't tip your own hand like that. Sigh. And people wonder why Yahoo is having issues.

  7. Snow Wombat

    This is like..

    an un managed diabetic, in the early stages of losing their limbs. Right now they are hacking off fingers and toes, but it isn't going to stop the gangrene.

    I for one, eagerly await the day that Tumblr 404's. I can't wait to see the tumblr social justice crowd lose their collective shit, when they can't blog about their oppression.

  8. Captain Dallas

    Hopefully, Meyer will disappear into obscurity after Yahoo crashes and burns. Surely no company would ever let her near the levers of power again?

    A study for future generations into how not to run a company and a lesson for future shareholders to ditch a CEO early when it's obvious they are out of their depth.

    1. Simon Ward

      "Sure no company would ever let her near the levers of power again?"

      You'd be surprised.

      Really, you would.

      1. Jeremy Allison

        That is *so* true...

        > > "Sure no company would ever let her near the levers of power again?"


        > You'd be surprised.

        > Really, you would.

        Yep. Once you reach the CXX level there are never any consequences for your actions. Google the ex-CEO of SGI who became a VP at Microsoft, then back to CEO here in the valley for a good example.

        What people don't realize about the HBO "Silicon Valley" TV show is that they have to *tone down* the antics of the VC's and company management. No one would believe the truth here..

  9. anthonyhegedus Silver badge

    I knew someone once who was heavily into yahoo. He had yahoo mail accounts, joined yahoo groups, chatted with hacker types and got his bank account hacked for his trouble, and generally swore by yahoo's ecosystem. He was also a conspiracy theorist, paranoid and incapable of forming relationships with people. He was one of those people with a horror story about everything. In the end his paranoid delusions got grander and grander after he imagined his carers stealing an old fire extinguisher (he was wheelchair-bound at the time), stealing a broken kettle and generally moving things around by letting themselves into his flat while he slept. Then he began to imagine I was hacking into his computers and deliberately infecting them with viruses.

    I don't know if there's a causal relationship, but I am now fairly wary of yahoo users, just to be on the safe side

  10. Numen

    News, Sports, Finance and Lifestyle

    Sounds like USA Today. Will they use USA Today's colors for each section?

  11. Just Enough

    Cost of an Astrology site

    How much does it actually cost to pay someone to make up 12 paragraphs of vague bollocks each day?

    Doesn't seem like much of a saving.

    1. Andy Non Silver badge

      Re: Cost of an Astrology site

      I wonder if Yahoo's resident astrologist saw this coming?

      "You will be seeking new job opportunities today."

    2. breakfast

      Re: Cost of an Astrology site

      I bet one could make a pretty great procedurally generated Astrology service that worked if anything better than most regular astrologers. It could also draw information from the best sources of superstitious sky-nonsense to derive internally consistent forecasts.

      That would be a fun and interesting challenge, albeit one that may have been completed numerous times, judging by the weird one-liner astrology columns that often turn up in newspapers.

      1. admiraljkb

        Re: Cost of an Astrology site

        @breakfast - brilliant idea. Put the devs about to get laid off to work on automating Astrology? Then they could sell AaaS. (Astrology as a Service) to all the newspapers and other media firms who could layoff their Astrologers? Marissa missed another opportunity. :)

        (oddly enough, I'm writing this as a joke, but seriously wondering about the business opportunities of something like that.)

        1. Pascal

          Re: Cost of an Astrology site


          This is exactly the way newspaper astrology sections are created daily. Some of them license the picture of a "famous" local astrologist to headline the column for extra credibility however.

  12. nijam

    > .... we’ve decided to make the following product decisions.

    WTF? Semi-literate business-school jargon. No wonder they're struggling.

  13. Knewbie

    Nooooooo !

    Not the astrology ! how will I be able to prepare to go out and fight the world everymorning without my personalized chart ? who will tell me that today is the day I get rich and meet a nice woman ? or that I should not bow to pressure and have a walk ?

    It mean^s... I'll have to call mom again ...^^

  14. JacobZ


    Pisces: Bad news may come in the mail. Do not make any long-term plans.

  15. hypernovasoftware

    I haven't used Yahoo! since the dial-up AOL days; at least a decade.

  16. Michael Habel Silver badge

    I think the last time I was anywhere near Yhoohoo was when they still hosted, but that was nearly 20 years now... Actually more like 17, but really what's an extra 3 years.

  17. JLV Silver badge

    bye, bye, won't miss you.

    I was going to ask about what was happening to dev-facing stuff like the YUI js library.



    IMPORTANT: The YUI library is no longer actively maintained. Please see this announcement for more information. YUI is a


    Died sometime in 2014 apparently.

    I have no real antipathy towards Yahoo, but they've been irrelevant for a loooong time now.

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