With PageRank at its heart, Google was founded in 1998 and enjoyed explosive early growth in 1999. People liked the AltaVista-like, simple, clean search UI Google offered, and generally warmed to its weighted, relevant results, served by the PageRank algorithm’s analysis of over 50 million pages in 1999.
In 2000, Google made its business breakthrough, becoming the default search engine for one of the earliest Internet icons, Yahoo!
If you’ve read all the above, you can see a crossover or collision occur, as AltaVista declines and Google rises. AltaVista sought to fend off Google in the early 2000s with interface and indexing relevance tweaks. However, between 1999 and 2001, Google stole the momentum, knocking the wind out of AltaVista’s sails. An oft-quoted stat puts AltaVista vs Google user share at 17% vs 7% in the year 2000, but the tables were turned very shortly after that.
Famously exerting further downward pressure on AltaVista were a string of acquisitions, where it changed hands from DEC, to Compaq, to CMGI, to Overture Services, and then by acquisition of Overture to Yahoo! Along the way, AltaVista moved away from the clean search results first UI into becoming an all-singing all-dancing portal, helping nail its coffin shut (Hi Google).
Though it was formally shut down by Yahoo! in 2013, nearly 18 years after it first made WWW waves, many of us remember AltaVista fondly. It pioneered the fast and uncluttered search results model users loved, before Google stole its clothes and its thunder. It also introduced genuinely helpful online extras like advanced search operators, translations, and free ISP-agnostic webmail for those who didn’t want Hotmail. All this, before it was killed by mismanagement and becoming bloated.
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Mark Tyson Social Links Navigation News Editor Mark Tyson is a news editor at Tom's Hardware. He enjoys covering the full breadth of PC tech; from business and semiconductor design to products approaching the edge of reason.
Mindstab Thrull I remember using Alta Vista as my primary search engine of choice for many years. It didn't just have a clean interface. It was also the first search engine I'd ever seen where you could add restrictions to your search – something other sites like Excite seemed to lack from what I could tell, and something Google would eventually adopt – and then somehow make worse. Alta Vista was a great engine in the days when most of North America was still on dialup. I miss its simplicity and utility. Mindstab Thrull Reply
bit_user Zaranthos said: Search was better when there was true competition. Nobody really challenges Google these days Bing still exists and seems not bad, when I try it on occasion. Here's a list of search engines that also shows what they use as their backend: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_search_engines Reply
Key considerations
- Investor positioning can change fast
- Volatility remains possible near catalysts
- Macro rates and liquidity can dominate flows
Reference reading
- https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/big-tech/SPONSORED_LINK_URL
- https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/big-tech/search-pioneer-altavistas-star-shone-bright-with-a-clean-and-minimal-ui-30-years-ago-engine-lost-momentum-after-multiple-ownership-changes-and-the-embrace-of-the-web-portal-trend#main
- https://www.tomshardware.com
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