As you may have seen on the net or on the last page of the business section, Yahoo! is shutting down some of their less-popular services, one of which is the Alta Vista search engine. Yes kids, there was a time before Google, and in that time there were a number of competing search engines, and Alta Vista was one of the most popular.
Alta Vista was started by Digital Equipment to show of some of their new technology. Back then, Digital was still a major player in the computer biz, while Yahoo was a brash new upstart. So at the time I worried that this was another example of an established company throwing money at a project to run a new competitor out of business (this was around the same time Microsoft was going after Netscape) and it seemed there was no hope for new tech firms.
With hindsight, all parts of that worry seem quite silly. Yahoo stayed in in business, Digital faded away, Yahoo and Alta Vista were both eclipsed by an even younger contender, and Microsoft found they couldn't muscle every contender out of business. So let that be a lesson on how the mighty fall, and how fast they fall in technology.
And if you're wondering about other search engines...
- Lycos - still around; bonus marks for having a link to Tripod
- Excite - still going, though the site throws a hissyfit if you don't have cookies enabled.
- Webcrawler - still there
- Hotbot - still there, with a robot character based on the original logo
- Infoseek - just sends you to Disney's go.com
No comments:
Post a Comment