The Search Engine Graveyard
Who died, who survived, who killed them — and what you should actually be using.
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AltaVista
1995 – 2013
At Their Peak:
Was the most advanced search engine of the 1990s. First to index the full text of the web. 80 million daily queries at its height. The go-to search engine for the educated internet user before Google existed.
Cause of Death:
Overture Services acquired AltaVista in 2003 for $140M. Yahoo then acquired Overture for $1.63B later that year, inheriting AltaVista. What followed was years of neglect, rebranding, and feature butchering. The technology that could have competed with Google was systematically dismantled. Yahoo shut it down in 2013. Google didn't kill AltaVista — Yahoo did.
The Part They Don't Tell You:
AltaVista's natural language search ('Ask AltaVista') predated modern NLP by years. Had Yahoo invested instead of shelved it, the history of search looks very different.
“The best search engine of its era, murdered by the company that bought it.”
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