Oh no. Yahoo Pipes to loose Term Extraction

Yahoo! Pipes visual interfaceImage by Tom Raftery via Flickr

A lot of people have Yahoo Pipes on death watch simply because they're a Yahoo product which make no money.

Yahoo Pipes is incredibly popular. Well. Um. I like it and the data I've at hand suggests it is a well used service.

Today Yahoo have announced they'll be discontinuing the Term Extractor module.

This was an excellent module. It would let you look at a blog title or comment and distill it down to keywords. That would then let you, for example, sort through lots of blog posts automatically to look for keywords that interested you and were significant in the blog post. In effect you could jury rig a basic monitoring tool if you wanted too.

Why is Term Extractor module going? We can only assume this is due to the Bing deal. Yahoo are winding down their search engine and that technology must have been a key element in the module. The module is likely to have been an expensive one for Yahoo to run.

Hopefully this will be the only hit Yahoo Pipes takes. It will worry developers who may now start to consider alternatives (if they hadn't been already). What do you think? Is Yahoo Pipes doomed?

Update: Yahoo have listened to the community and decided to keep this module. Rar.

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