On July 8, 2013 Yahoo will shut down the old-school search engine altavista.com.
Yup, altavista.com. Memories of the late 1990s of when it was one of the top search engines.
- 1995: Founded at altavista.digital.com
- 1996: Became the exclusive provider of search results for Yahoo!
- 1997: Earned US$50 million in sponsorship revenue.
- 1998: AltaVista the first searchable, full-text database of a large part of the World Wide Web
- 1998: Sold to Compaq
- 1998: Compaq paid AltaVista Technology Incorporated (“ATI”) $3.3 million for the domain name altavista.com
- 1999: Compaq redesigned AltaVista as a web portal, hoping to compete with Yahoo!
- 2003: (February) Bought by Overture
- 2003: (July) Overture itself was taken over by Yahoo!
- 2013: Shut down
(info culled from wikipedia entry on Altavista)
You’d think that nobody visits AltaVista anymore, right? Wrong. As of today according to Alexa, altavista.com is the internet’s 7,049th most popular website in America. Alexa reports their demographic is largely 55-64 year old males, no college.
What does a rank of 7,049 mean? Here are other sites with similar ranking:
- 7039 comicbookresources.com
- 7065 freerepublic.com
- 7085 esquire.com
- 7116 expedia.co.uk
- 7157 cmu.edu
- 7176 glamour.com
- 7177 bestwestern.com
- 7189 yammer.com
- 7196 photoshop.com
- 7206 mediabistro.com
- 7257 sun-sentinel.com
That means altavista.com gets as much traffic as these other sites! Well, not for long, because Yahoo is going to shut down altavista.com on July 8, 2013.