Yahoo Clues Closes As Mayer Reorganizes

Marissa Mayer, the latest Yahoo CEO, has been both expanding new ventures and trimming off the excess fat. Seven Yahoo products have been classified as unnecessary and are on the chopping block. Last month, Yahoo announced the pending closures.

Among the doomed seven is Yahoo Clues, which will no longer be active as of April 1st. We wrote about this service when it was first released. Yahoo Clues gave statistics of search terms. These statistics included country of origin, the searcher's age and gender demographic, and related search terms.

Yahoo Clues

Google Trends

Yahoo Clues works very similarly to Google Trends. In both services, you enter a search term and look at trends in search history. You can adjust the timeframe and limit or expand the countries of origin. In both you are able to view related search terms. Yahoo Clues did have an advantage over Google Trends where you are unable to view age and gender demographics of who performed the search.

Yahoo Clues

Google Trends

As you can see from the above screenshots, Google is already providing you with the same data that you might be losing from Yahoo. We recommend that you give Google Trends a try for that data you might be looking for.

All things considered the closure of Yahoo Clues was a smart move by Mayer. It's not making them money, it's taking away valuable resources and with Google Trends there to fill its place and chances are users won't miss it for long.

The other six Yahoo products that will be shutting down are Avatars, their BlackBerry app, their App Search, Sports IQ, their Message Boards Web site, and Yahoo's Updates API. This is a sizable change ...