Yahoo Finally Shuts Down AltaVista (TIME LINE) - Microfinance Monitor

Yahoo has buried the erstwhile search engine AltaVista, as announced on its newly-acquired Tumblr website. The pioneering search site AltaVista was older than Google and founded in 1995 and had an index of more than 20 million webpages. AltaVista had developed its own 'crawler' technology that was pre-cursor to present search giant Google. Yahoo had acquired it along with Overture for $1.7 billion in July 2003. Overture had bought AltaVista earlier that year from Massachusetts-based CMGI Inc. Now visitors to AltaVista are being idrected to Yahoo's latest search site, with crypt message" "Please visit Yahoo Search for all of your searching needs." Bidding it good-bye, search engine expert Danny Sullivan wrote in his obit: "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." Here is a brief timeline of AltaVista: 1994: Jack Marshall, cofounder of ATI, registered the name Altavista.com. 1995: AltaVista was created by researchers at Digital Equipment Corporation's Network Systems Laboratory and Western Research Laboratory to easily find files on the public network. Paul Flaherty was responsible for the original idea, and Louis Monier wrote the crawler, and Michael Burrows wrote the indexer. Dec, 15, 1995: AltaVista was launched as an internet search engine at altavista.digital.com. Traffic reached 300,000 hits on the first day, reached 80 million hits per day two years later. 1996: AltaVista became the exclusive provider of search results for Yahoo!. 1997: AltaVista's service became popular and it earned $50 million in sponsorship. 1998: Digital, owner of AltaVista, was sold to Compaq for $3.3 million. June 1999: Compaq sold a majority stake in AltaVista to CMGI, an internet investment company. 1999: Compaq redesigned AltaVista as a web portal to compete with Yahoo! and focused on shopping and free email. Feb.2003: AltaVista was bought by Overture Services. July 2003: Overture was taken over by Yahoo!. Dec.2010: A Yahoo employee leaked PowerPoint slides indicating its closure. May 2011: Shut down begins and all search results began to appear on a Yahoo! page. June 28, 2013: Yahoo announced that AltaVista would be shut down. July 8, 2013: Finally Shut down and visits to AltaVista's home page are redirected to Yahoo!'s main page. via Technology - Google News http://news.google.com/news/url?sa=t&fd=R&usg=AFQjCNHNjRA6Xu7kWGRR_W5zWG2dSogoJw&url=http://www.microfinancemonitor.com/2013/07/09/yahoo-finally-shuts-down-altavista-time-line/

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