Popular Search Engines from the 90s, then and now
posted by sugarfish on Sep 17, 2009 - 92 comments

EXTRY! EXTRY! Read All About It! New York Times commits Freudian-Slippish Typo in title of AltaVista story! (link ironically via Google News)
But seriously, with CMGI selling AV for about 6% of what it paid to buy it, and Overture's stock price dropping 20% the day the deal was announced, does this mean AltaVista is D.O.A.? If so, where will we go for a dopey translation/Douglas Adams tribute?
In other Search Engine News, those Norwegians at FAST (aka alltheweb.com) are gettin' a Dell, dude. And the guy who started all this by selling out to Google is real quiet.
posted by wendell on Feb 20, 2003 - 10 comments

J'ECRIS JE DESSINE, Pour les enfants écrire, dessiner, lire sur Internet. Inventer des contes, faire des dessins, les publier.
posted by mikrophon on Sep 20, 2002 - 26 comments

I speak other languages real good. Contemporary Jack-of-All-Trades Jothanan "J.D." Feinberg has been involved in a variety of projects. As a musician, he was the original touring drummer for They Might Be Giants, and as a software programmer, he's employed by the brains behind the Netomat project, and has currently updated a couple projects which play around with AltaVista's Babelfish. [more]
posted by Smart Dalek on Aug 15, 2002 - 11 comments

AltaVista's catalog of 500 million Web pages hasn't been fully updated since July. AV used to be my search engine of choice, then (for a short time) Hotbot, and now Google. What will the search engine look like that replaces Google?
posted by tranquileye on Oct 25, 2001 - 9 comments

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 on Oct 8, 2001 - 11 comments

Lost in Translation ?
TRANSLATION: This extension of the pagination the great energy of the translation of the confusion of Alta Vista.
ORIGINAL TEXT: This page demonstrates the great translating power of altavista's babel.
(via CasaFidel)
posted by howa2396 on Mar 15, 2001 - 45 comments

Altavista redesigns. Again. Seems they're trying a Yahoo/DMOZ feel this time, with LookSmart results as their directory. Didn't they do this once before?
posted by danwalker on Feb 3, 2001 - 13 comments

Altavista to become only search engine
Not really, but they do plan on enforcing several search-related patents that they have, hoping to increase revenue by extorting other search companies. "We believe that virtually everyone out there who indexes the Web is in violation of at least several of those key patents.... If you index a distributed set of databases - what the Internet is - and even within intranets, corporations, that's one of the patents," says CMGI CEO David Wetherell.
posted by daveadams on Jan 18, 2001 - 25 comments

AltaVista lies to England about free net access. I am shocked that a company in the honorable net industry could think of such a scam! Shocked I say!
posted by Mick on Aug 22, 2000 - 7 comments

AltaVista redesigns. Comments? I like it.
posted by Succa on Jul 29, 2000 - 31 comments

Cinco de Mayo is the biggest day of the year for avocados -- it is a Mexican holiday, but a minor one. It marks a May 5, 1862, victory by a small army of Mexican patriots and peasants over stronger French forces, but it's not Mexican Independence Day -- a common misconception among Cinco de Mayo partyers in the United States. In the United States, it's become the Latin version of St. Patrick's Day -- largely because makers of beer, chips, salsa and tequila promote it heavily as a reason to party.
posted by palegirl on May 5, 2000 - 11 comments

Instead of Yahoo's LSD design, AltaVista's new Raging Search site is Google's GLS (Goofy Logo, Search).
posted by tomalak on May 3, 2000 - 9 comments

If you use AltaVista's yellowpage listings, you may be letting Alexa know exactly where you live, where you're planning on flying, and who you talk to on the phone. This is so far beyond a simple breach of privacy. This is insane.
posted by mathowie on Feb 9, 2000 - 1 comment

The design team over at Amazon.com needs to up their medication. What was once the most tabbed-interface on the web, but still quite useful, is now a raging mess of yahoo-category-style links that are all the same color. This reminds me of the altavista redesign a few months back. I wonder if they'll lose some customers on this one.
posted by mathowie on Feb 2, 2000 - 10 comments

The Mondo Mini Shows at Altavista are brilliantly funny flash movies. I especially enjoyed the Steve Jobs Macworld Keynote and the Pamela Anderson interview. There's parodies of political candidates and other celebrities too, hilarious stuff. [thanks backupbrain]
posted by mathowie on Jan 28, 2000 - 1 comment

heh, Altavista left some of their old URLs up after the redesign. Take a look at the top banner, remember how useful the altavista.com page used to be? Thanks to their current redesign, I prefer this version of their search engine.
posted by mathowie on Nov 9, 1999 - 2 comments

My god, does the new Altavista look butt-ugly. Can you find anything anymore? I could barely see the search box when I first loaded it. And that new logo? Yawn..... And what's up with the new slogan? Smart is beautiful? What's next: 'Altavista: Check out the size of our brains'?
posted by mathowie on Oct 25, 1999 - 0 comments