A Relevant Tale: How Google Killed Inktomi

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.

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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.

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Re:A Relevant Tale: How Google Killed Inktomi by simonw on Friday May 04, 2012 @03:03AM (#3927414)

Yup, when I worked at Yahoo back in 2006 I remember altavista being described as a useful site for running experiments.

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Re:A Relevant Tale: How Google Killed Inktomi by robryan on Thursday May 03, 2012 @07:31PM (#3926301)

An isn't yahoo search now powered by bing? Tough game search these days when the no. 2 search engine is highly unprofitable.

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