Yahoo! Inc. (NASDAQ:YHOO) has finally drawn the curtains on its once popular and pioneering search engine AltaVista today, ABC News reported.
Three years before Google Inc (NASDAQ:GOOG) came into online existence, AltaVista was introduced in 1995 and gained huge popularity among web surfers. The Palo Alto, California-based search engine had indexed 20 million webpages and developed its own ‘crawler’ technology.
For those who don’t remember what it looked like, AltaVista was a yellow-and-blue colored webpage that gave tough competition to Excite.com and Lycos.com, other search engines of its time.
Yahoo Acquired Part of AltaVista In 2003
However, in early 2000s, by the time Yahoo! Inc. (NASDAQ:YHOO) acquired it as part of its $1.7 billion purchase of Overture Services in July 2003, the California-based search engine had already lost its charm to Google.
The company announced the shutdown via its Tumblr blog on June 28. “Please visit Yahoo! Search for all your searching needs,” the post said.
“You were loved. You really were,” Danny Sullivan, an industry expert wrote in a blog post. “People did not want to leave you. But despite adding new features, some of which Google copied, you couldn’t keep up with the pace and innovation of that company, which decided against becoming a portal like your corporate masters ordered for you.”
When users go to AltaVista.com, they are redirected to the home page for Yahoo! Search, which is powered by Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ:MFST)’s Bing
The downfall of AltaVista began after it added online services like that made it more like Yahoo! and less like a search engine.
