Yahoo and Google shelve products to save cash

Yahoo and Google have both made cutbacks to their portfolios to save cash

Web giants Yahoo and Google both showed signs of suffering from the economic crisis this week by announcing significant cut backs to various parts of their businesses.

Just a day after announcing that Carol Bartz will replace Jerry Yang as chief executive, Yahoo decided to ditch its Content Match advertising partnership programme in Europe.

Content Match competes with Google's AdSense platform, enabling publishers to monetise sites by displaying sponsored links according to content, user profile or geography.

"Yahoo Europe is closing Content Match as we do not wish to invest further resources in developing this product," Yahoo said in a statement.

"We have other products which, in the current climate, are attracting a growing proportion of advertiser spend, and we would like to focus our efforts on these. These include Sponsored Search and Display, including Direct Response solutions."

Meanwhile, arch-rival Google announced on its blog that it would be shelving Catalog Search, Mashup Editor and mobile social networking tool Dodgeball.com.

The firm will also port micro-blogging service Jaiku over to the Google App Engine, and stop development of the Google Notebook online research tool. Support will be discontinued for Google Video uploads in a few months' time.