A hail and farewell to AltaVista

[The Straight Story]

This is what happens after a series of bumbling owners fail to keep a once terrific product relevant in a dynamic market: You get a cold PR send-off that doesn't even fill the screen.

"Please visit Yahoo! Search for all of your searching needs."

That's all Yahoo wrote Friday afternoon as it lumped in the news that it was killing off AltaVista on July 8 with word that it will also ax 11 other products that no longer matter to the company.

Jay Rossiter, the vice president in charge of platforms, said the moves will free Yahoo to streamline its efforts and thus "continue to focus on creating beautiful products that are essential to you every day."

Fair enough. Yahoo needs to husband its resources and devote them to projects that matter. Truth be told, AltaVista, once the best of the bunch in the era before Internet search meant Google and three guys named Moe, has unfortunately been irrelevant for quite some time. In fact, the biggest news about its date with the guillotine may be that it was still alive after all these years. On Twitter, most folks reacted the way Mitch Kapor did when he wrote "Yahoo shutting down AltaVista. I, for one, profoundly surprised it was still alive. Ave atque vale." (That's Latin for "hail and farewell." Hey, Mitch is a Yalie, after all.)

Danny Sullivan, the doyen of digital search, nicely chronicled the history of a search engine that most owners seemingly couldn't wait to unload after acquiring it. The list included the likes of Digital Equipment, Compaq, CMGI, Overture, and Yahoo. Hardly a harbinger of success when your corporate parent's name changes faster than the identity of the person sitting in the White House.


http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-57591629-93/a-hail-and-farewell-to-altavista/

[Captain Stern]

1. I confess...I thought AltaVista had shut down years ago (nt)

[Tx4obama]

2. When I click on my old link...

This one... http://babelfish.altavista.com/

... it goes straight to Yahoo now

Back in the old days when learning Italian I used that site dozens of times per day.

Fare thee well

[The Straight Story]

6. At least web crawler is still around :) And anyone remeber using Archie?

http://www.webcrawler.com/

http://www.netlingo.com/more/gopher.php

he lowdown on Archie, Gopher, Veronica and Jughead
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Archie, Gopher, Veronica and Jughead are three standard "finding" tools on the Internet. The Archie database is made up of the file directories from hundreds of systems. When you search this database on the basis of a file's name, Archie can tell you which directory paths on which systems hold a copy of the file you want.

To use Archie, you must Telnet to an Archie server. You can do that by keying in a command such as telnet://archie.internic.net to get to the Archie server at that address and log on by keying in archie when prompted to do so. Once you do your Archie search, you must then go get the file using FTP, the Internet File Transfer Protocol.

A Gopher is a menu system that simplifies locating and using Internet resources. Each Gopher menu at each Gopher site is unique. Gopher menus usually include the other familiar features of the Internet. You can use a Gopher to Telnet to a location or to FTP a file or to do just about anything else--as long as that option is listed on the Gopher menu.

Gopher software makes it possible for the system administrator at any Internet site to prepare a customized menu of files, features and Internet resources. When you use the Gopher, all you have to do is select the item you want from the menu.

[NaturalHigh]

3. I only used AltaVista a few times.

Back in olden times, I used Excite.

[Live and Learn]

5. I am probably the only person that still uses Altavista.

Was really sad to see Yahoo buy it but still used it our of habit. Guess I will have to switch to dogpile or DuckDuckGo.