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Yahoo Puts AltaVista To Death
An anonymous reader writes "Remember AltaVista from the late '90s? Yahoo is finally pulling life support and letting Altavista die a noble death after over 15 years of hard service." You can only take so many years of being a running gag.
I won't believe it until Netcraft confirms it
AltaVista still exists?
You'll never make me use Google!
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
I know they use the same engine (Bing), but IMO AltaVista's results page seems more complete and intuitive than Yahoo's. For two equivalent searches, the AltaVista page has more similar searches, has more "more results from ...." links, and just seems tighter and more cohesive.
Has anyone asked Jeeves if it's true? That guy's a prodigy in his earth city (or geocity, if you will.)
If you can only take so many years of being a running gag then can we look forward to Yahoo! pulling the plug on itself?
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I did a search for "google" using it, just because I can be mean-spirited like that. But also I think there's probably some old guy out there who uses AltaVista as his home page because before his children abandon him they set that up for him and now it's abandoning him, too, but he's heard about this Google thing. Unfortunately, he thinks typing URLs and such into AltaVista is how the internet works. So he's leaving that search result up on his screen forever. Until the power goes out one fateful night, and he dies.
timothy... not only did you post an article with a bad link, but the site is blocked by MacAfee for having malware.
"Running gag" is a shame, they really were pioneers in the search engine business. For me the switch to Google was simply because it had (and still has) an uncluttered interface.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
Ahh Alta Vista, you were my search engine of choice back in the 90's until Google came along.
CRT's, floppy discs and 14,400 dial up modems...those were the days.... ...sigh
Wow. Make me feel like an old timer! I used to love altavista - it was the absolute best there was.
Now, wasn't it astavista that provided me with so much reasonably priced software?
Three Squirrels
In its heyday, it was the best.
Its last words were "I'll be back".
Have gnu, will travel.
I'm about as surprised to find out this was still around as I was last week when I found out SVN still existed. Don't tell me ColdFusion is still on the market...
So long and thanks for all the fish, Altavista.
I first learned search engine optimization by studying Alatavista, then moved on to Hotbot (Inktomi).
That was the beginning of a great business, and my first good paying job.
I remember back in the day AltaVista was the only search engine which allowed you to use + and - to fine-tune the results. Before Google's pagerank that was the best you could hope for.
Just put the AltaVisa domain on top of Yahoo Search with an AltaVista logo. Old users won't know the diff. Why kill off a few thousand customers for lack of a logo?
Table-ized A.I.
It was the only search engine that allowed very specific +/- combos. I remember it being better in that respect than Google is now (although Google was vastly better returning correct results when it came on the scene).
Looks like it's back to using the alternative.
Accept Eris as your Fnord and personally sate her
Lycos anyone?
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
Anyone else use Infoseek?
'I don't know what it's called. I just know the sound it makes, when it takes a man's life.' ~ Four Leaf Tayback
With a full-blown Web Portal to boot!
I remember AV, from the early to mid 1990's. It was pretty much irrelevant by the late 90's.A product of DEC (long before DEC was acquired by HP), it COULD have been Google if DEC had half a brain regarding the Internet. Too bad - I really liked DEC hardware and software (Ultrix, VAX, Tru64 Unix, etc). Once HP bought DEC - into the dump it went! :-( In any case, it did show what you could do with web searches. Innovative, and ahead of its time - two damning attributes for a new software paradigm!
I remember when they had the only decent directory and search engine on the Internet. Seems like an eternity ago.
Farewell, AltaVista.
Alta la vista Baby!
Or something like that...
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
For years now, when checking for DNS resolution and basic Internet connectivity from whatever network I'm in, my first quick test has been "ping altavista.com". Year after year, I trusted that if the Internet connection was working, I'd get a response. Altavista never let me down :)
I remember when the original URL was http://altavista.digital.com/
In the early days it even recognized Pathworks Mosaic 1.0 by its user agent, and served up a really, really simple HTML page just for it.
There was even a Personal version of the search engine that you could download and run on your own server to index your Intranets.
Sad to see it go because the world really needs more diversity when it comes to search engines. If there is something the Big Engines don't want you to have, it might as well not exist.
Had best image/video search first, and their "free" dial-up was great.
The G
I remember back in the day AltaVista was the only search engine which allowed you to use + and - to fine-tune the results. Before Google's pagerank that was the best you could hope for.
From the for what it's worth department... when Google dropped the ability to force inclusion of specific search terms, which was shortly before it introduced Google+, it was incredibly contentious inside Google itself, and a lot of Google employees at the time, myself included, complained bitterly about the ability to get accurate results any more.
Most of use were natural lexicographers who could think hierarchically enough that we knew the search terms we wanted in order to get the results we wanted. surprising how we ended up working at a search engine, right? About 2/3rds of us really felt they were "dumbing down" search in order to use the same datastores for normal search as the first and second order relationships being used to generate targetted advertising results. Altavista was mentioned *a lot*.
baby.
by TheSpoom (715771) Uncaring Linux user here. I have nothing to add to this but please continue. *munches popcorn*
Didn't Altavista develop a major problem with spam? You search for almost anything and porn sites were among the top items returned?
It seems that was a major reason which I switched to Google--which was in Beta at the time--and still in Beta several years later.
But it's the only search engine that returns results for "Sock Puppet"
Table-ized A.I.
AltaVista was a huge innovation. Nobody at the time thought that someone could provide a search service for the entire internet for free. DEC rented the old vacant telephone building behind the Walgreens in downtown Palo Alto. (That building now houses the Palo Alto Internet Exchange, which at one time was the major Silicon Valley switching node for the Internet.) They installed DEC Alpha rack-mounted machines. The whole thing was a demo of DEC Alpha technology, to show that a large number of DEC machines could do things no mainframe could.
That was a huge change from previous data center construction. Until then, most data centers had raised floors and nice cabinets. Telephone central offices, though, had tall open racks firmly bolted to the building, with cable trays overhead. AltaVista was the first big data center built that way. Telcos were better at cable management than computer services in those days. Using telco-style cable management turned out to be a huge win.
it was the only search engine at the time that let you do +- stuff and return even less meaningful results
next we are going to have a candlelight service for lycos?
"Let me AltaVista that for you" just doesn't roll off the tongue like Google does.
Maybe that's Yahoo's problem too.
In those days, the best I could do was a 26.4Kbps dial-up connection ...
That's an odd bit rate. I'm guessing you had a noisy line?
Back in the day they were a good webmail client too. They used to have a number of TLDs to choose from. After they were bought out by compaq and then hp though the mail service went to shit and eventually ended up being part of mail.com. I still miss my pyrus@earthling.net address though.
Stop using those search engines, almost every search goes to some databases, get your self together and start using your own search engine, you control the search, yacy.net
The best translator ever?
at least we still have Dogpile and Ask Jeeves
You'll never make me use Google!
Er, I honestly can't figure out if that was a "whoosh" going past, but you do realise that Dogpile is just a meta search engine that uses Google's results amongst others?
Easy fix for that. You want to enable verbatim mode with google. Click "search tools" then the "all results" drop down menu, then click Verbatim. Google will no longer try and use synonyms.