For those who weren’t into search on the Internet before Google became King, you’ll need to say goodbye and pay homage to a search engine you may have never heard of which is Altavista.com.
Sure, Altavista is now powered by Yahoo (or Bing actually) and even in the title bar of the website it says “Yahoo Search – Web Search.”
The fact of the matter is that before there was Google there was Altavista and a handful of other search engines (Webcrawler, Lycos, Go, Magellan, Excite, Inktomi, Hotbot, Ask Jeeves, Northern Light) to name a few.
In 2003, Yahoo bought Altavista along with Overture Services. It was rumored a couple of years back that Yahoo would finally be putting the nail in Altavista’s coffin. But, with Marissa Mayer as the newish CEO of Yahoo it is finally time to say as of July 8, 2013:
“Altavista, Hasta La Vista Baby!”
References:
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2421215,00.asp
http://www.wired.com/beyond_the_beyond/2013/07/dead-media-beat-alta-vista/
