Yahoo shuts down AltaVista

[mmadhankumar]

Once up on a time, there was a popular search engine called AltaVista. It lives no more.

On Monday, its owner Yahoo Inc sent AltaVista.com to the internet graveyard to rest alongside order-almost-anything venture Kozmo.com and the butler from Ask Jeeves.

Palo Alto, California-based AltaVista was introduced in 1995, three years before Google Inc was founded.

Eclipsed by Google in the early 2000s, AltaVista's star had already faded by the time Yahoo acquired it as part of its $US1.7 billion ($A1.89 billion) purchase of Overture Services Inc in July 2003.

Overture had bought AltaVista earlier that year.

Yahoo announced AltaVista's fate on its Tumblr page late last month.

Search industry expert Danny Sullivan called it "the bright child neglected by your parents" in a blog post eulogising its fate.


Sky News: Yahoo shuts down veteran AltaVista