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

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

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

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