AltaVista seems to have made some changes. I though that they now used Yahoo’s DB for search, but recently I have noticed differences in the SERPs. For example on a search for Playhard casinos I rank 1 and 2 in Altavista, but only near the bottom of the first page on Yahoo. For Best roulette system I rank 7th on AltaVista and 9th on Yahoo. This suggests they are tweaking the algos, or even using a different version of the DB. Has anyone else noticed anything?
Not sure about a comeback. Altavista is so last century. It has been eaten by big G like all and every other search engines, except maybe Yahoo. And the truth is nobody really need something else than G, yahoo, and maybe MSN/Bing to be honest. I'll be surprise to see a site's owner saying " i have no traffic from G, nothing from Yahoo, nothing from Bing, but thousands of uniques from altavista"...
They were always my favourite, back when they were still owned by Digital Equipment Corporation. Then Compaq bought them, and started trying to make the site into a portal. And then Compaq sold it to Overture. And then Yahoo! bought Overture, and stuck their damn name on the front of BabelFish.