Search Engines and Algorithms: Optimizing for Yahoo! Search and AltaVista - Altavista
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AltaVista
One of the oldest search engines, AltaVista has changed much over that past decade. AltaVista’s search technology is now powered by Yahoo, which is why it’s being talked about in this particular article.
AltaVista means "a view from above." It was one of the first major search engines to appear on the web. Unfortunately it lost significant market share from its peak years at the end of the 90's to such engines as MSN and Google, so that now AltaVista is only a minor search engine that uses the search index results from Yahoo.
When AltaVista started in 1995, engineers devised a method to store every word of every page on the entire Internet in a fast, searchable index. By December, less than six months after the start of the project, AltaVista opened to the public, with an index of 16 million documents. With more than 300,000 searchers using the engine on its first day, it was an instant success. By the end of 1996, AltaVista was handling 19 million search queries per day. AltaVista was a favorite of both novice searchers and information professionals alike, but saw the beginning of its decline in popularity when Google was born.
After many changes of hands, including Compaq and a company who owned part of Lycos, Overture purchased AltaVista in February 2003 for price of $140 million, a fraction of its valuation of $2.3 billion in 2000. Consequently, when Yahoo purchased Overture at the end of 2003, AltaVista was just part of the deal. It is now, unfortunately, just a mirror of Yahoo, using the same search index and basic user interface. So to optimize for AltaVista, you should actually optimize for Yahoo.
Wrapping Up
Hopefully, we’ll get a clearer picture of where Yahoo is going with search, as the My Web 2.0 beta, and the latent semantic indexing technology currently being researched by Yahoo, takes off. The evolution that Yahoo has undergone since the beginning is almost mind-boggling, and it doesn’t look like it’s stopping anytime soon. So we will just keep plugging along, and simply just go with the flow.
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