How AltaVista, our first good search engine, fell into the digital abyss

guest · Dec 19, 2020

An Alternate AltaVista Search Engine History Lesson For Internet Nerds
Why you can’t find the groundbreaking search engine AltaVista on the web anymore
December 15, 2020
https://tedium.co/2020/12/15/altavista-history-digital-dot-com-domain-name

A quarter-century ago, one of the first major search engines came to life on the internet as an experiment of sorts—a public test of a server manufacturer’s primary product that anyone with a web connection could take a part in. The experiment, for a time, proved more successful than anyone could have ever imagined.
But the problem was, it was an experiment at heart that was never intended to be a business—and that meant better suited companies would eventually topple this innovation.

Eventually, it would ensure that this cutting-edge idea would become a part of the past. But nobody is going to encase the innovations of 1995 and 1996 in amber on the internet: Time does not stand still, and neither do web sites, no matter how important they are or once were. But it would sure be nice if we could.
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Today’s Tedium, in honor of AltaVista’s 25th anniversary this week, laments the loss of its original home to the gods of search engine optimization.
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How AltaVista, our first good search engine, fell into the digital abyss
DEC, trying to kickstart things, needed a way to promote what the Alpha could do, [...]
And what better database to chew through than the World Wide Web? Hence, we got AltaVista, a shining example of what a struggling company’s server hardware could do.

So why did AltaVista lose? Well, while it was a great idea for a marketing tool, it was almost as if DEC didn’t realize that the search engine was a worthy business on its own until it was too late.
In The Search, a 2005 book on the rise of Google and the search engine in general, Wired cofounder John Battelle blamed a corporate culture that didn’t know how to handle having its kind of innovation under its roof:
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Ultimately, despite being the most popular search engine as recently as 2000, a series of poor decisions—including the misguided and eventually reversed choice to turn the search engine into a Yahoo!-style portal—ultimately ensured AltaVista would lose its place in the digital conversation.

During the last decade of its life, it was essentially a shell of its former self at Yahoo!. [...]
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Rasheed187 · Dec 20, 2020

Yes I remember AltaVista it was pretty good, one of my favorites together with Yahoo and Lycos. Too bad they didn't realize how big this internet search thing would get.

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How AltaVista, our first good search engine, fell into the digital abyss

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