As part of an ongoing attempt to streamline its business, Yahoo is closing a number of its current services.

The Yahoo Games site and publishing channel will be discontinued as of 13 May. Video texting service Yahoo Livetext will close at the end of March, with the features carried over into Yahoo Messenger.

The genre-specific segments of its regional media properties (for example Celebrity and Weather) will close in an unspecified number of locations, beginning with the Arabic and English Yahoo Maktoob site. Yahoo Astrology will close in the UK, France, Germany, Spain and India.

Finally, Yahoos BOSS hosted search, JSON search, placefinder and placespotter APIs will all be discontinued on 31 March. It will offers Javascript solution YPA to publishers in it place.

These closures are part of a larger set of cuts as Yahoo attempts to turn around its recent fortunes, possibly in an effort to make the business more appealing to potential buyers.

“During our last earnings call, we outlined a plan for simplifying the business and focusing on our strengths across seven core consumer products: Mail, Search, Tumblr, News, Sports, Finance and Lifestyle,” said Amotz Maimon, Yahoo chief architect.

As part of that plan, the company announced it would be laying off 15 per cent of its workforce, more than 1,500 employees, a process which began last month.