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Yahoo is cutting more fat today by closing its travel bargains website FareChase, which it originally acquired back in July 2004 and re-launched two years later. The company will be announcing the shut-down later today, and will start redirecting visitors of the service to its main travel site soon.

The service let customers perform comparative searches for pricing on flights, hotels, cruises and cars, but it was apparently not enough of a strategic product enhancement for Yahoo Travel, hence the company discontinuing it altogether to tighten its focus and cut costs in these difficult times.

Sounds like a plan to me.

According to Travel Weekly, Yahoo signed a new agreement with partner Travelocity in late February 2009, ensuring that the latter could continue its role as the primary booking engine for Yahoo Travel. In the past, Travelocity sparred with Yahoo over the prominent role that Yahoo gave FareChase on Yahoo Travel.

This is the latest deadpool decision from Yahoo in a long series of announcements.

The company had previously sold off shopping engine Kelkoo and shuttered online storage service Briefcase, photo sharing service Yahoo Photos, social network Mash, live video streaming service Yahoo Live, Ads in RSS, web-based video editing service JumpCut and student community website / job board KickStart.

Which service could be next on the chopping block?

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