AltaVista, one of the world’s first search engines, is to shut down next week as owner Yahoo looks to streamline its services. In a blog post, owner Yahoo said the service will shut down on 8th July, with all visits to the site being redirected to the Yahoo search engine. Created by computer manufacturer Digital […]
AltaVista, one of the world’s first search engines, is to shut down next week as owner Yahoo looks to streamline its services.
In a blog post, owner Yahoo said the service will shut down on 8th July, with all visits to the site being redirected to the Yahoo search engine.
Created by computer manufacturer Digital Equipment Corporation in 1995 (now part of Hewlett-Packard) AltaVista began life indexing about 20 million webpages, far more than any rival at the time.
It developed its own “crawler” technology to find webpages and log what was on them. The combination made AltaVista one of the top web destinations until 2001 when the number of searches conducted via Google overtook it.
Yahoo bought the site back in 2003 and began displaying search results from Yahoo – themselves now sourced from Microsoft’s Bing search engine.
A ‘fresh move’ for Yahoo
Yahoo described the shut down, which also includes a number of other services such as browser plug-in Axis as a fresh move to focus developers’ attention on “what’s next”.
“Today we’re shutting down a few products so we can continue to focus on creating beautiful products that are essential to you every day,” said Jay Rossiter, executive vice president for platforms, in a blog post.
The closures began taking effect on 28 June for search-oriented browser plug-in Axis which was only launched a year ago, as well as developer tool Yahoo Browser Plus and sports service Citizen Sports. The cuts continue through 28 September for developer tools Yahoo Local API and Yahoo Term Extraction API.
Web-based music player Yahoo WebPlayer will close down on 30 June; media player plug-in FoxyTunes and Yahoo RSS Alerts will close on 1 July; neighbourhood news service Yahoo Neighbors Beta will end on 8 July; celebrity news aggregator Yahoo Stars India will shut down on 25 July; and third-party downloads tool Yahoo Downloads Beta will close on 31 July.
The company directed users of its RSS Alerts to its Keyword News alerts. For other features the company recommended services such as Yahoo Music, its Sports app, Yahoo Search and Yahoo India OMG.
Yahoo users up 10%
While shutting down some services, the company is also developing others through relaunches or acquisitions as it looks to reinvent itself under current chief executive Marissa Mayer.
At Yahoo’s most recent shareholder meeting, on 25 June, it reported that user activity is up 10%, with user interactions on the homepage up by 25 percent. Photo uploads on the company’s Flickr service are up fourfold since its relaunch, the company said.
Yahoo has acquired 14 companies since January, including photography app developer GhostBird Software and conference calling start-up Rondee, both acquired on 13 June.
Other notable acquisitions include the buyout of social blogging site Tumblr in May for more than $1bn (£660m) and the acquisition of news aggregation app Summly, developed by a British teenager, for around $30m in March.
Read the Yahoo announcement here
