After I had switched to Google, I never understood why all of the competition just disappeared over night. You would think they would have given it a fight, but that never seemed to happen. At least this article gives a little insight to that. I still wonder what happened to Altavista.
AltaVista tried to jump on the 'portal' bandwagon. I remember at the time how stupid I thought they were, trying to beat Excite and Yahoo at something that was already old hat, a concept that had the Internet had outgrown. Then they screwed up pretty much the same way Inktomi did.
AltaVista still exists. It's awful, and it's powered by the Yahoo search engine. Which is pretty much the same thing, I suppose.
Yahoo! bought Overture (which owned AltaVista) way back in 2003. They only replaced the search results with Yahoo!'s a year ago after announcing the site would be shut down. Seemed like they were using it as an occasional test bed in the meantime.
