March 25 (Bloomberg) -- Yahoo! Inc. is closing a service called FareChase that helped users find travel bargains, part of a plan to tighten the company’s focus and cut costs.

Yahoo will shut down the service today, sending users to its main travel site instead, spokeswoman Bahareh Ramin said in an e-mail. Yahoo bought FareChase in 2004. The service let customers search for prices on flights, hotels and cars.

“Discontinuing FareChase will let us focus our efforts on strategic products and features on Yahoo Travel,” Ramin said.

The company faces slumping online advertising and mounting competition from Google Inc., which dominates the Internet- search market. Yahoo’s new chief executive officer, Carol Bartz, said earlier this month that she was looking at cutting services to streamline the company.

“Everything’s open for examination,” Bartz said during an investor conference in San Francisco this month. “I feel in this time, we need to make sure we are running very tight fiscally.”

FareChase’s software gathered prices on travel from dozens of Web sites. After consumers determined their travel plans, FareChase would link them directly to the travel providers’ sites to complete purchases. Yahoo Travel relies on Sabre Holdings Corp.’s Travelocity to book trips for customers.

Yahoo also plans to shut down a storage service Briefcase by March 30. In 2007, the company closed its Yahoo Photos service, directing users to the faster-growing Flickr site.

Smaller Profits

Bartz, who took over the CEO job in January from Yahoo co- founder Jerry Yang, aims to revive growth after three years of shrinking profits. Yahoo rejected a Microsoft Corp. takeover offer of as much as $47.5 billion last year, alienating some investors.

Yahoo handled 21 percent of U.S. Internet searches in February, according to ComScore Inc., a research firm in Reston, Virginia. The company ranks a distant second to Google, which accounted for 63 percent of searches. Microsoft is third place, with an 8 percent share.

Yahoo, based in Sunnyvale, California, fell 6 cents to $13.55 at 4 p.m. New York time in Nasdaq Stock Market trading. The shares have climbed 11 percent this year. Google, up 12 percent this year, fell $3.10 to $344.07.

To contact the reporter on this story: Brian Womack in San Francisco at bwomack1@bloomberg.net

Last Updated: March 25, 2009 16:30 EDT