Hasta La Vista, Alta Vista: World’s first major search engine to shut

Before there was Google, there was Alta Vista. Alta Vista, a premier search engine before Google rose to power in 2001, will be having its plug pulled on7 July by its current owner, Yahoo. Begun in 1995, Alta Vista was one of the big, original search engines that figured out search algorithms in a way that blew pre-existing search engines away. “A prototype of the new search system, formally called Alta Vista but known popularly as a “super spider,” was made available to the Web-browsing public at no charge,” said an editorial in the New York Times in December 1995. [caption id=“attachment_924277” align=“alignleft” width=“380”]  File photo of a woman using a computer. Reuters[/caption] Alta Vista indexed around twenty million web pages when it began. Now, of course, when search indexing goes into the tens of billions, it seems like a minor number. But the search engine’s indexing vastly outnumbered that of other search engines such as Lycos, Excite and InfoSeek. “I would say you were the Google of your time, but it would be more accurate to say that Google was the Alta Vista of its time,” wrote Danny Sullivan in a eulogy to the search engine. “That’s because Google didn’t exist when you were ascendant. That’s also because you helped pave some of the way for Google.” To fully understand just how relevant Alta Vista was, first-generation dot-com types will remember that before 1995, Yahoo wasn’t actually carrying out full searches. Instead, they used a manually created directory, wherein staff had organised data into pages. Alta Vista’s downfall began in 1998 with a series of ownership changes. Both Overture and MSN competed to buy it. Yahoo ultimately bought Overture in 2003, and Alta Vista was part of the package deal. Alta Vista is one of about a dozen Yahoo services which are being terminated as a part of Yahoo CEO Marissa Meyer’s attempts to focus on the company’s core businesses, as well as attempt to reinvent the struggling trailblazer. If you fancy a trip down memory lane, check out a screenshot of the search engine from 1996 on the Wayback Machine over here. And if you want to know more about Alta Vista, don’t forget to Google it.