Yahoo is finally pulling the plug on AltaVista on July 8th. It appears as a one line entry in Yahoo’s latest list of closures (http://yahoo.tumblr.com/post/54125001066/keeping-our-focus-on-whats-next) with the comment “Please visit Yahoo! Search for all of your searching needs”. AltaVista was started by Digital Equipment in 1995 and quickly became the default search engine for many of us. I still meet people who have remained loyal to AltaVista even though it lost its unique search features a long time ago. Danny Sullivan has written a short history and eulogy for the search engine at http://searchengineland.com/altavista-eulogy-165366 – “A Eulogy for AltaVista, The Google of its Time”. Great though it was, some of us had already defected to the Inktomi powered search engine HotBot by the time Google had arrived on the scene. Alas, HotBot is now a shadow of its former self and AlltheWeb, which Yahoo had also acquired, was closed down in April 2011.

I’ve unearthed the AltaVista chapter and summary that I wrote for an early edition of Search Strategies. The chapter is at http://www.rba.co.uk/search/altavista/AltaVistaChapter.pdf and the summary sheet at http://www.rba.co.uk/search/altavista/avsumm.pdf