Posted on 07/06/2013 11:20:28 AM PDT by Olog-hai
Pioneering search engine AltaVista is due to be shut down on 8 July.
AltaVista was one of the first search engines to index significant amounts of web content, and proved hugely popular before Google debuted. …
AltaVista was launched in 1995 when search engines generally did a poor job of logging information on the web’s rapidly growing population of sites.
The search engine was popular because it had indexed about 20 million webpages, far more than any rival at the time. It developed its own “crawler” technology that did the job of finding web pages and logging what was on them. It also used fast computers behind the scenes to return results quickly. …
(Excerpt) Read more at bbc.co.uk ...
Hasta la vista to Alta Vista. (somebody had to say it)
And also, wish I’d kept using Alta Vista, as IMHO, Google sux. Well, not altogether, but they’re collecting info on all of us. Too big to fail, or something like that.
Guess Alta Vista was too small to spy.
Ah, AltaVista, that sure brings back memories....
I wondered who was running Altavista.
Back in the mid-1990s (seems so long ago), Alta Vista spent considerable time servicing as my default search engine. I haven't even thought about it for years and was shocked to find out it was still in operation.
It is amazing how quickly Google took over online search and now Google is probably the most powerful corporation in the entire world (information = power), though many people don't realize it yet.
Google is what some science fiction writers warned us about back in the 20th century. Google is quickly becoming an all-knowing "god-like" entity and the source of nearly all information.
In fact, so convinced am I of Google's power that as soon as I hit the POST button on this reply, I'm bound to see web advertisements for aluminum foil and for books on paranoia (free shipping if I act now!)
The internet was pretty cool, when it first went GUI (graphic user interface).
For example there was a whole lot of amateur genealogy information. No cost, and good people to work with.
People that had specialized books would scan relevant pages, and send it to you.
Since then, it has become more and more “commercialized.”
Instead of 100s of people, Ancestry.com took over for the most part.
I now use ixquick as they do not collect personal data.
yet another piece of the old Digital Equipment Corp fades away...
AltaVista was useful for research because when you searched for a company or organization, that entity’s own website would come up first—the most reliable for checking the name.
Infoseek was ok for its time 1994.
DEC was to mainframes as APPLE was to PC’s.
(we’ll always have TRON)
Is “Ask Jasper” still around ?
Don’t use google, they track your every move.
Use this. No tracking, no cookies, etc.;
The spirit of the web is on life support today. Now it’s all marketing.
Screw it.
Anyone else remember World Wide Web Worm? wwww
True, but you'll have to dig a little deeper to get to the real truth. Here's a short (30 sec) video that explains who controls the information.
use STARTPAGE.COM as it piggyback’s on Google’s crawler’s, that’s why it’s search results are more exact. Ixquick gives me weird results. They’re both the same org anyways..
It was ask Jeeves.
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