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AltaVista (www.altavista.com)
is the Web’s oldest crawler-based search engine and was the Google of its
day – top dog in the search engine world.
From the time it went public in 1995 and for most of the next four years, AltaVista
provided top-notch relevancy in search results with a strong, loyal following.
Powered by parent Digital Equipment Corporation’s Alpha Servers, here was
nothing faster out there.
In 1998, things started to slide when AltaVista was turned into a portal during
the “portal craze” and the importance of the search function became
secondary. This resulted in a drop in relevancy, an increase in stale listings
and a crawler that was slowing down compared to newer technology.
AltaVista went from being owned by DEC to Compaq (now Hewlett-Packard), then
was spun out as a company majority-owned by CMGI. Overture purchased AltaVista
in 2003.
A recent refocus on searching has resulted in improvements to AltaVista, but
newer crawler-based search engines such as Google
and AllTheWeb continue to outpace it with
more comprehensive results.
AltaVista is still strong is in terms of some its specialty searching features.
It provides a good image, video and audio clip search service. Its news search
service is also still top-notch.
Here’s a quick look at the top Internet search engines:
| Search Engines
- Google
- All
The Web
- Yahoo!
- MSN
Search
- AOL
Search
- Ask
Jeeves
- Teoma
- HotBot
- Lycos
- AltaVista
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- Netscape
Search
- WiseNut
- Open
Directory
- Inktomi
- Looksmart
Additional Search Engine Resources
- Other
search engines
- Web
Site Directories
- Search
Engine Lists
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