Once up on a time, there was a popular search engine called AltaVista. It lives no more.
On Monday, its owner Yahoo Inc. sent AltaVista.com to the Internet graveyard to rest alongside order-almost-anything venture Kozmo.com and the butler from Ask Jeeves. Palo Alto,
We mourned the closing of AltaVista when it was announced at the end of last month. But today’s the day it actually closed. No more AltaVista. Gone. Perhaps no one will suffer as much as the inhabitants of Pawnee, Indiana.
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Calif.-based AltaVista was introduced in 1995, three years before Google Inc. was founded. Eclipsed by Google in the early 2000s, AltaVista's star had already faded by the time Yahoo acquired it as part of its $1.7 billion purchase of Overture Services Inc. in July 2003. Overture had bought AltaVista earlier that year from Massachusetts-based CMGI Inc.
Yahoo announced AltaVista's fate on its Tumblr page late last month. Search industry expert Danny Sullivan likened AltaVista to a bright child neglected by its parents.
"You were loved. You really were," Sullivan wrote in a blog post eulogizing the site. "People did not want to leave you. But despite adding new features, some of which Google copied, you couldn't keep up with the pace and innovation of that company, which decided against becoming a portal like your corporate masters ordered for you."
