AltaVista, the Biggest Fail Ever

The early search engine had promise, but Yahoo has decided to kill it. Go figure.

Yahoo announced it has shuttered AltaVista—or what was left of it anyway. In a series of corporate trades over the years, Yahoo had gotten hold of the property, which had been neglected by its previous owners. Still, I'm not sure why Yahoo kept it running this long.

AltaVista was the child prodigy of search engines. It was destined to become the heavyweight champion of the world, but it was a short-lived career. You see the kid came from the wrong part of town, then known as the Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC).

DEC in the 1990s was into making fast servers and AltaVista was developed mostly to use server technology. It was the brainchild of Paul Flaherty and founded by the international team of Louis Monier and Michael Burrows.

Back in those days however, no one believed you could monetize a search engine and it was always assumed AltaVista would never flourish, even though it was essentially Google two years before Google existed. It indexed the entire Web and cached most of it for quick results, just like Google. And it was popular.

This was academic, though, because Compaq bought DEC and AltaVista became the red-headed stepchild of the deal.

The Compaq folks had no vision whatsoever and botched the whole DEC merger. Compaq even lost the huge edge DEC had in server technology incorporating the then-fastest CPU on Earth, the Alpha. Compaq seemed as clueless as a chimp with a wax banana. The company ultimately decided to gussy up AltaVista by making it into a pretty portal emphasizing free email and shopping.

The property then ended up being sold to a high-flying dotcom called CMGI, which figured you could make money with a search engine by rolling out an IPO and cashing out. Alas, the market crashed before this could happen and by then Google had joined the business with its page ranking trick, sucking all the AltaVista users away. The product bounced around after that but its usefulness waned as Google dominated.

(Curiously Yahoo had its mitts on AltaVista earlier as it was said to be powering the early Yahoo search efforts.)

During the late 1990s a slew of minor search engines and unique crawlers came and went, mostly bought by Yahoo, then eventually Google and Microsoft, never to be seen or heard from again. AltaVista was essentially the last straggler.

So we are left with Google, Bing, and DuckDuckGo. Potential fortunes were lost every which way in the process. And nobody says "you can't make money with a search engine" anymore.