GeneralYahoo shuts down AltaVista search engine

Yahoo shuts down AltaVista search engine

Yahoo has finally shut down AltaVista, a search engine that was started 18 years ago, that is, in 1995, three years before the company called Google even existed. It seems like keeping it going wasn’t a feasible option, now that Google has emerged as the undisputed ruler in this territory.

The tech company headed by Marissa Mayer had been planning to kill the service for quite sometime. Yahoo had first hinted that its mulling over closing it down in 2010, reports PCMag. And in June this year, the news confirming that its termination is slated for July 8 surfaced on the web. The official AltaVista website now just redirects to Yahoo search.

AltaVista Logo

The highly popular portal of the late 1990s was created by Digital Equipment Corporation, a company headquartered in Palo Alto and had taken the world by storm by providing results for most of the things people entered in it. The search engine was probably the only one at that time to have successfully indexed as many as 20 million web pages, way more than all of its competitors.

On the first day, AltaVista managed to get around 300,000 hits and two years after its conception, that would be in 1997, the website was entertaining as many as 80 million hits on a daily basis. The parent company was later bought by Compaq which in turn sold the portal off to CMGI. This company had decided to start IPO to get the website back on track, but the plan fell flat on its face. After about two years, Overture Services came along and bought AltaVista and in the same year, this company itself was taken over by Yahoo, thus bringing the search engine under the latter’s wings.

As was announced last month, Yahoo finally ended AltaVista apparently with a view to save up on its resources. Yahoo Citizen Sports, Browser Plus and Axis are just some of other services that have also shut shop.

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