October 8, 2001

12:57 AM

AltaVista to be closed down?I guess their über-portal strategy failed. no big news here. but closing down the search engine entirely? i guess you don't need 100 folks to run the spider and indexing machines.. ok.. there are hardware and network/bandwidth costs associated.. but closing it all down?
no question. there is competition out there. and the googles and fasts are the new benchmarks.
but i sure remember the days when AV was super-fast (also in including submissions into their live index) and super-relevant. but in those days, the internet was much smaller and AV was owned by digital (compaq).
those were the days when infoseek tried to compete and hotbot tried to rise to stardom.
times changed. but i sure would miss AV.
posted by HeikoH (11 comments total)

my bad. i missed out on interpreting pud's post on FC. the rumor is actually not concerning the AV search engine / search site but *only* referring to CMGI's shopping.com.

then again, having watched AV and its spin-offs closely over the past years, and also trying to reflect on my own online user behaviour, how many times have i really used sites such as shopping.com? even though i do like the idea of comparison shopping, i have to say the answer would be "close to never".

when was the last time anyone used a site from the AV network?
posted by HeikoH at 1:07 AM on October 8, 2001

As mentioned in the comments on f'ed company, that is a typo. It should read that AltaVista's Shopping is rumoured to be shutting down.

So far, no news or rumours about the search engine going anywhere.

posted by Lionfire at 1:10 AM on October 8, 2001

I dunno how seriously to take the mouthbreathers at f*ckedco, but (then again) I guess it wouldn't really shock me. Babelfish was kinda handy -- anyone know of a good substitute?
posted by RavinDave at 1:10 AM on October 8, 2001

ummmm.

A rumor from fucked company's forum warrants. . . . .????
posted by crasspastor at 1:12 AM on October 8, 2001

Babelfish was kinda handy -- anyone know of a good substitute?

A farsighted monkey at a typewriter?
posted by Optamystic at 1:15 AM on October 8, 2001

Dictionary.com (warning: popunders) has a translation service as well (powered by the same engine).
posted by wheat at 1:28 AM on October 8, 2001

the reason for babelfish is that everyone still thinks of babelfish, but if you must talk about alternates powered by the same engine, why not just use the systran site directly? but you're going to think babelfish instead anyway, so there.
posted by elle at 3:14 AM on October 8, 2001

FuckedCompany is generally pretty accurate, which is why so many sinking companies block access to the website from their intranets.
posted by sean17 at 8:29 AM on October 8, 2001

I haven't used AV since I found out about Google, and that was years ago - Google have added a shedload of new features since then...
posted by mis at 9:13 AM on October 8, 2001

If it ain't Google, it ain't a-searchin! I continue to be stunned by how *good* Google is. I can't imagine life without it.
posted by davidmsc at 11:43 AM on October 8, 2001

Babelfish was kinda handy -- anyone know of a good substitute?

Google has some translation tools here: http://www.google.com/language_tools.

There's also a "translate into English" feature in the Google Toolbar.
posted by valerie at 1:06 PM on October 8, 2001