Hasta La Vista, AltaVista

Founded in 1995, AltaVista was an early web search engine, and was one of the most popular search engines. AltaVista was the first internet search to launch Image, Audio and Video search capabilities with multilingual support. The site was awarded a record number 61 search-related patents for its search features and capabilities. The engine allowed users to limit search results from a domain in order to prevent the same results appearing multiple times. AltaVista received 300,000 hits on its first day – this increased to over 80 million hits per day just two years later.

However, with the growth of Google, AltaVista lost some of its power and was purchased by Overture in 2003. In the same month, Overture were taken over by Yahoo!. AltaVista struggled to keep up with the pace and innovation of Google, despite that fact that Google had copied some of its features. People who were users of AltaVista started jumping ship and using Google, and Google became so popular that most people now seemed to have no notion of any other search engines, and often referred to the process of using a search engine as ‘googling’.

In July 2013, Yahoo! turned to Tumblr to announce the closure of AltaVista, in an ‘ongoing effort to sharpen focus and deliver experiences that enhance our daily lives.’ The AltaVista site will now redirect users to Yahoo! Search.