Altavista, the Search Engine to shutdown on July 8

Altavista, the most coveted Search Engine of pre-Google era will breath its last on July 8. Yahoo Inc. which owns Altavista has said in a statement that it would close down the operations of Altavista next week.

Altavista, founded in 1995 by Digital Equipment Corporation was one of the major search engines in the Pre-Google Era. It competed with Yahoo Search intensively but lost the battle to Google after 1999.

In 1995, when AltaVista was released, the search engine was dubbed a “super spider” for its ability to crawl Web pages. It could scan more than 13,000 different discussion forums on the Usenet network.

Altavista continued to innovate till last 2003. It planned to battle Google by rolling out a dramatic overhaul of its site and indexing methodology. However it didn’t work.

In 1995, Altavista was processing 2.5 million search requests a day. Today, Google, processes 5.1 billion searches each day.

Digital Equipment Corporation was acquired by Compaq in 1998, which merged with Hewlett-Packard in May 2002. AltaVista itself was purchased in 2003 by Overture Services, then the leading seller of online search advertising. Overture, in turn, was purchased by Yahoo, in 2003.

Yahoo tried to kill Altavista in favor of its own Search Engine. However after partnering with Bing, Yahoo shutdown its own search engine and so has become the fate of Altavista.

As reported in Newyork Times,  Jay Rossiter, executive vice president of platforms at Yahoo, said that the search engine would be closed on July 8. Anyone who still uses AltaVista — I’m not sure who that is — should instead go to Yahoo Search, Mr. Rossiter said.