RIP AltaVista: Yahoo Shuts Down The Once Popular Search Engine

Back in December 15, 1995, a internet search engine known as AltaVista, was introduced to the world. Known to be one of the earliest search engines it gained immense popularity, receiving 13 million queries every day.

In 1996, AltaVista became the exclusive provider of search results for Yahoo!, before it was bought by compaq in 1998. After the acquisition, AltaVista started diverging it's attention away from being a search page towards being a portal offering features such as shopping and free email. In 1999 compaq sold majority stake in AltaVista to CMGI, an internet investment company. Around this time AltaVista was on a decline, loosing market shares, especially to Google. This was mostly due the fact the the portal strategy was proven unsuccessful.

Around 2002, AltaVista decided to drop out portal features and refocus on being a search engine, but it was already too late. In February 2003, the search engine was bought by Overture Services, Inc. Eventually, Overture along with AltaVista was brought by Yahoo (July 2003).

Yahoo has now shutdown the search engine once in for all, on visiting the website, you will now be redirected to the yahoo search engine. Hints about the shutdown came back in 2010, when a Yahoo! employee leaked PowerPoint slides indicating that the plugs would be pulled off form the search engine, as part of a consolidation process. The tech giant officially announced that it will be service on June 28.