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Yahoo Puts AltaVista To Death

Posted by timothy on from the pour-your-electronic-version-of-a-40 dept.

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.

9 of 176 comments (clear)

  1. Obligatory by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    I won't believe it until Netcraft confirms it

    1. Re:Obligatory by hairyfeet · · Score: 5, Funny

      So let me get this straight, Yahoo owns Altavista and uses Bing for a back end, took down Altavista only to put it back up with a yahoo back end, that is really being back ended by Bing?

      Damn no wonder they pulled the plug, hell the ping times must have been awful!

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      ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
  2. at least we still have Dogpile and Ask Jeeves by Trepidity · · Score: 5, Funny

    You'll never make me use Google!

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    10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
  3. Running gag? by Molt · · Score: 5, Funny

    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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    404 Not Found: No such file or resource as '.sig'
  4. Re:AltaVista by bonehead · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Yeah, but it's not what it used to be.

    Back in the day, it was the best search engine out there. Used it dozens of times every day. Granted, that was back when "www.hp.com" was an invalid URL and you had to use "www.hp.boise.com" to get a printer driver, but still....

    Can't necessarily say I''m "sad" to see them go, but it does raise a little pang of nostalgia.....

  5. Re:bad link, evil link by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    link works fine, you are just infected with the McAfee Virus

  6. Re:Back in the Days of Kerosene Internet by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    Now, wasn't it astavista that provided me with so much reasonably priced software?

    No, it was www.astalavista.box.sk

  7. Re:AltaVista by Z00L00K · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I stopped using Altavista when they nuked the "NEAR" keyword.

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    If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
  8. From the for what it's worth department... by tlambert · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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*.