Hasta La Vista AltaVista

AlstaVista.com now serving Yahoo / Overture search results.

Palo Alto, CA - At one time AltaVista was the darling of the search world. With ground breaking technology and innovative tools like the Babel Fish translation service, AltaVista holds over 60 search related patents.

The search engine who's name means "a view from above" regards itself as the Internet's first full-text searchable database of the web, although at the time, (1995), there wasn't anywhere near the amount of content as today.

AltaVista accomplished the first multilingual search capabilities on the net, (Babel fish), was the first search engine to introduce searching of image, audio, and video files, and claims "..the most advanced internet search features and capabilities..", although others such as Google with its launch this month of many new features may challenge that position.

It seems like the posturing is just beginning in the search engine war, but in reality it has been going on behine the scenes for many years. What is different now is there fewer and fewer rivals for the title of best search engine.

Like many other things in computing, what seemed like groundbreaking technology -- the ability to search the internet for example, is now taken for granted. End users expect they can type in a few keywords and find exactly what they are looking for. Then with a click they are gone, using the search engine's resources and not paying a cent for it.

To monetize the traffic a search engine gets, most have become glorified advertising / portal sites, or worse, offer up nothing but second hand results from another engines index.

Let's hope the Google / Yahoo / (Microsoft Search Engine) war leaves some room for innovation like AltaVista accomplished in its days in the sun.

Note: we include the as-yet-undeveloped Microsoft search engine as a combatant in the war only because the company has indicated it will develop a search engine. Microsoft has the money to fund development, now they just need to figure out how to force it onto people's desktops without getting slapped for anti-trust activiy (again).


So long AltaVista.com, you were cool when the net was new but you did not keep up with the times.

The score this week:

• Google ....... 1
  
• Yahoo ........ 1
  
• Microsoft .... 0