Since 2013, Yahoo has been on an axing spree. They have acquired and shut down several of the startups and companies they have acquired. Not only that, they have also shut down many of their own products.

Why does a corporate giant need to go through all these measures? Yahoo not only axes products because they feel like it, but they are doing it in order to develop more of their popular products.

However, this doesn’t mean that all of the products they let go are gone forever. After all, they have gained a loyal audience who have loved using the services they provided. This is why they have integrated many features from the products that they retired into other areas of its more well-known products.

This 2014, Yahoo continued the trend they started of retiring their lesser known products. Earlier this year around April and May, they eliminated a couple of products such as Bookmarks.yahoo.com, Newlook Service and Research Reports.

In what seems like a continuous move, they released a new list of products that they are retiring. Yahoo Cloud Platform Group senior vice president Jay Rossiter wrote in a blog post that they have been focused on “making the world’s daily habits more inspiring and entertaining.” This has allowed them to launch new products while also making their core products – which existing users already love – even better.

Rossiter continued on to say that in order to achieve this kind of innovation, they had to take a hard look at their products. As a result, some of them needed to be shut down and their features integrated into existing Yahoo experiences.

With that said, here’s a list of products that are facing elimination:

• People Search – shut down in order to focus more on Yahoo Search, which functions as the one place where users can search for everything: people, places, maps, blogs, etc.

• Xobni – retired along with the Smartr Product Suite. Some of its features such as the compose auto-suggest and people-centric mail search have been integrated into Yahoo Mail.

• Yahoo Toolbar on Chrome – will be retired on July 22 in order to comply with the recent policy of Google Chrome. Yahoo Extension for Chrome will take its place which will offer users quick access to Yahoo.com. Those who use Firefox and Internet Explorer can still use Yahoo Toolbar.

• Yahoo Shine – this features posts on a range of topics and will be shut down in July 31. Yahoo rolled out several digital magazines that offer much more deeper into the topics provided in Yahoo Shine. Not only that, these magazines also offer more advertising opportunities for brands. Magazines such as Yahoo Beauty and Yahoo Travel will continue to bring topics that users loved on Yahoo Shine along with much better visuals, a stronger editorial voice and more engaging native advertising. 

• Yahoo Voices and the Yahoo Contributor Network – Voices.Yahoo.com will be shut down on July 31 while Contributor.Yahoo.com will be shut down at the end of August.

Yahoo is dedicated to focusing on four core areas: Search, Communications, Digital Magazines and Video. They will also put effort into developing Flickr and Tumblr further.

With all of these changes, it’s pretty clear that Yahoo is changing the way users make use of its services. Whether or not the shut down of some products will be a success or not remains to be seen.