Yahoo is something of an anomaly in the search engine world today. It’s one of the most popular search sites (the second most popular, in fact), if we choose to call it a search site at all. Certainly, users can conduct a search on Yahoo’s home page – and many do! – but all of those searches are being run by Microsoft, and thus will yield essentially identical results as Bing. Nevertheless, Yahoo has kept open many of its search-specific tools. Recent announcements may indicate that Yahoo is letting go of that era, however: Yahoo Site Explorer is set to be shut down later this year.

What is Yahoo Site Explorer? Anyone who ever submitted a website likely knows of the service, since it was one of the mandatory spots where a sitemap needed to be sent before your website was really “done.” An additional lineup of webmaster tools were also a part of the service. However, all of these features are already covered by Bing via the Microsoft Webmaster Tools – so why keep the second service open at all?

Simply put, there were still some regions where the ability to submit a sitemap to Yahoo was important. More specifically, this included the regions where Yahoo was still using their old organic algorithm to rank sites, having yet to migrate the region-specific site to Microsoft. Those migrations are continuing now and will be finished by the end of the year. As soon as the last region has migrated to Microsoft (or, in select cases, to another search engine), the Site Explorer will be closed.

Hemant Minocha, Product Manager of Yahoo Site Explorer, stated that “Having two webmaster portals for a single source for organic results does not add enough value,” and encouraged users to register for Microsoft Webmaster Tools.