Yahoo! shuts down the search engine AltaVista
Yahoo! shuts down a few under performed products including Alta Vista Search Engine.
Yahoo! wants to keep its focus on the next web and mobile inovations and is shutting down under-performed products such as AltaVista search engine, Yahoo! Axis, Citizen Sports, Yahoo! WebPlayer, FoxyTunes, Yahoo! RSS Alerts, Yahoo! Neighbors Beta, Yahoo! Stars India, Yahoo! Downloads Beta, Yahoo! Local API, Yahoo! Term Extraction API
Below is some interesting timeline on Alta Vista:
- 1995 - AltaVista was found.
- 1996 - AltaVista started providing search results exclusively for Yahoo! Search
- 1997 - AltaVista became the top destination for most web searches, received over 80 million hits per day, earned $50 million in sponsorship revenue.
- 1998 - Compaq bought Digital who owned AltaVista and paid $3.3 million for the domain name altavista.com.
- 1999 - Compaq redesigned AltaVista, then sold the majority stake in AltaVista to CMGI Investment Company. Google started to gain popularity in search engine traffic.
- 2000 - 2002 - Started with the dot-com bubble bursting and Google gaining much more popularity, AltaVista's search traffic decreased substantially.
- 2003 - Overture Services, Inc. purchased Alta Vista for $140 million in cash and stock, then Yahoo! purchased Overture Services, Inc. for $1.63 billion.
- 2004-2013 - AltaVista was owned and maintained by Yahoo!, but just as an under-performing search engine.
- Yahoo! announced that it will shut down AltaVista on July 8, 2013
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