What ever happened to AltaVista?
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Back in the heyday of 1995 there was one young upstart that threatened to turn the search engine world on its head. Hard to believe but it was Altavista.
The young search engine exploded onto the scene the product of Digital Equiptment Corporation, which would explain why its first domain was altavista.digital.com (in fact Digital didnt gain the rights to altavista.com for two years and severla thousand dollars).
Today Altavista hardly exists anymore, so whatever happened to all the promise and hype?
Well to begin with in 1995 the only two main competitros were Excite and Lycos (both of whom have suffered similar fates). Yahoo! at the time was focussing on its core directory business and regarded search as a distant second.
Altavista took advantage of its users by displaying vast amounts of advertising on both its search page and its results page. In fact sometimes it was difficult to determiend where the results actually were.
The engine approached search from a new perspective, it created a full text searchable database of every html page it spidered, this gave its results a new level of depth, but with that came excessive search times. Some searches would take as long as 30 seconds to return results, while others would show highly irrelevant results much due to the attempts of the early SEO companies.
The end of Altavista really came when Google entered the market. This new upstart changed the way we thought about search, we began to demand accuracy and fast query times. Google averaged less than a second per search and its reslts were astonishingly accurate.
Altavista had a choice at this time, it could respond to the Google threat and declining visitor numbers by uping its search performance and investing heavily in new techniques or it could increase the advertising space on the page in order to protect its revenue stream. It did the latter.
In doing so it drove even more users away to the waiting arms of Google. Things continued to go from bad to worse as the company attempted to copy Yahoo! by creating a portal. However Yahoo! was already well establshed in the portal space and it wasnt long before Altavista abandoned the idea.
In the end the declining revenue made Altavista vulnerable to takeover, and this happened several times until it arrived in the hands of Overture which was eventually bought by Yahoo!.
Today teh site still exists but its index is gone and it uses Yahoo! search now.
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