Yahoo Puts AltaVista To Death

An anonymous reader writes "Remember AltaVista from the late '90s? Yahoo is finally pulling life support and letting Altavista die a noble death after over 15 years of hard service." You can only take so many years of being a running gag.

Running gag

[TapeCutter]

"Running gag" is a shame, they really were pioneers in the search engine business. For me the switch to Google was simply because it had (and still has) an uncluttered interface.

Re:AltaVista

[bonehead]

Yeah, but it's not what it used to be.

Back in the day, it was the best search engine out there. Used it dozens of times every day. Granted, that was back when "www.hp.com" was an invalid URL and you had to use "www.hp.boise.com" to get a printer driver, but still....

Can't necessarily say I''m "sad" to see them go, but it does raise a little pang of nostalgia.....

Re:bad link, evil link

[Anonymous Coward]

link works fine, you are just infected with the McAfee Virus

Re:AltaVista

[bonehead]

Heh... Yeah...

Back when I was still using altavista, I heard something about a search engine called "google" here on slashdot. People seemed to like it, but I couldn't figure out why. Lots of people raved about how cool their "simple" page was, but I didn't think that was a big deal. Tried google once in the beginning, wasn't impressed with the search results, and kept going with altavista.

Was probably a little over a year later I was looking for something, altavista wasn't finding it, so out of desperation I figured I'd give this "google" thing a try. The exact thing I was looking for was the first result. Never used altavista again.

By the way. I never did buy into that whole "Don't be evil" crap. I wasn't born yesterday.

Re:AltaVista

[Z00L00K]

I stopped using Altavista when they nuked the "NEAR" keyword.

Re:AltaVista

[pegdhcp]

Do you remember DEC? If they could see the potential in search engine market, they would end up buying Compaq and HP, with the head start they have. For the sake of fairness, I do not think nobody could see search services as a major product before Google showed us.