Re:A Relevant Tale: How Google Killed Inktomi
by bstar77 on Thursday May 03, 2012 @01:28PM
(#3924802)
After I had switched to Google, I never understood why all of the competition just disappeared over night. You would think they would have given it a fight, but that never seemed to happen. At least this article gives a little insight to that. I still wonder what happened to Altavista.
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Re:A Relevant Tale: How Google Killed Inktomi
by lobster_johnson on Thursday May 03, 2012 @01:55PM
(#3924927)
AltaVista tried to jump on the 'portal' bandwagon. I remember at the time how stupid I thought they were, trying to beat Excite and Yahoo at something that was already old hat, a concept that had the Internet had outgrown. Then they screwed up pretty much the same way Inktomi did.
AltaVista still exists. It's awful, and it's powered by the Yahoo search engine. Which is pretty much the same thing, I suppose.
Re:A Relevant Tale: How Google Killed Inktomi
by dangrossman on Thursday May 03, 2012 @04:08PM
(#3925507)
Yahoo! bought Overture (which owned AltaVista) way back in 2003. They only replaced the search results with Yahoo!'s a year ago after announcing the site would be shut down. Seemed like they were using it as an occasional test bed in the meantime.
Yup, when I worked at Yahoo back in 2006 I remember altavista being described as a useful site for running experiments.