Besides closing down some services here in U.S., Yahoo (NSDQ: YHOO) is now considering divesting the European comparison shopping site Kelkoo, reports FT. It bought the site in 2004, for a price then of about $575 million. It said in the FT story: “Today we are starting a process to give Kelkoo more independence—while we evaluate strategic options for the long-term future of the business.”

Yahoo UK managing director Glen Drury hinted about this to us in an interview last week, where he explained the challenges with the market and the product: “It’s had its good and its bad points, to be quite frank. I think Kelkoo is a fantastic company and many things have changed in that part of the industry. It’s not just Kelkoo that’s been affected. You probably noticed that Scripps (NYSE: SSP), as an example, was announcing that the profitability of their company that they own, which is BizRate and Shopzilla, has been affected. An industry-wide perspective and just to give you the two-second take - I think that Kelkoo and all its competitors need to really re-think the way that they’re going to run their businesses in the future.”

In June, Yahoo named Toby Coppel, formerly chief strategy officer, as head of Europe, and this move is probably as a result of a review by him.