According to Search Engine Land and other sources the Alta Vista Search Engine has officially closed. You now get redirected to Yahoo. This is a sad day. The once great Alta Vista established in 1995 has been reduced to a landing page with an affiliate ID referral code, the domain simply redirects to Yahoo, WOW!
The ironic part of Alta Vista closing is they were a search engine before Yahoo. That’s Right! Back in the 1990’s (for some that is ancient) they actual were a search engine when Yahoo was only a directory. In those days the primary search engines were Excite, Alta Vista, Lycos, HotBot, Infoseek, Meta Crawler, and few others. Since Google, pretty much everyone has been put out of business. Yahoo has merged with Bing to combine their search engines and search query reach on the Internet. They are advertising like crazy, but Google is phased very little still comfortably controlling the vast majority of searches on the Internet.
What is a bigger shame and concern is what happens to Babelfish? The language translation software the Alta Vista introduced to the world? Good News, they are still in business and you can find them here: http://www.babelfish.com/ So even though Alta Vista will be gone they still leave a few legacy things to be remembered by.
Good Bye Alta Vista thanks for all the search engine listings in the 90’s.
If you would like read more about Alta Vista Closing click here: http://searchengineland.com/altavista-officially-closes-what-will-pawnee-do-166159
