Alta Vista was a great engine in it's time. I worked for the company (cmgi) that bought AV from Compaq/Dec. We bought it for $2.3 Billion in 1999, at the height of the internet bubble and then sold it at a massive loss to Overture for $140 million 4 years later. DOH! In our datacenter here on the east coast there were 400 servers dedicated to AV. There were even more servers than that on the west coast for AV. Makes me wonder how many thousands of servers google must have
I used to use Altavista (only) around the mid-90s when I was first introduced to the internet. Then, I moved to Yahoo (only). I discovered Google when a friend told me about it. This was in the first few days of it's launch and I didn't really think much about it at that time Anyway, these days I only use Google and don't use any other SEs unless I can't find something in Google and I know that it's a smaller company. It's easier to find something like a local hardware store in MSN or Yahoo most of the times, than it is in Google. I'm sure Google caches these sites and probably shows them in it's search but the're probably on Page 10 or so ......
Agree, I remember Altavista as the Search engine where it was possible to find anything you want, while the newbie Google was attractive due the lack of advertising but not offering great results back in 1999. Today is the inverse situation, I do all my research through Google but Altavista is still the second big seeking option for me. BTW, by such time Lycos had an awesome multimedia seeking feature but particularly the ftp search was something I have never found again anywhere after it was sold to Terra.
I used all of the search engines as well. AltaVista was one of my primaries as well as Yahoo. I also used HotBot a lot. Then about 3 or 4 years ago I started using strictly Google.
Oh, and I also used AskJeeves for a very short period of time until I realised that ..... well, it sucked!
Yep I always use it as well, prob in 1998. Than I started using Google and never looked back, I think it was 1999 when Google became popular.
In the mid 90s, AltaVista was the top referrer along with Yahoo. Infoseek was my favourite, along with Hotbot at the time. In this century, nothing's beaten AllTheWeb - the greatest of them all.
There was a time it was the best engine, not anymore... There was a time it had the best translation service, still does... Back in those days I just discovered the internet and was thinking of ways to make money. Man, I spammed the crap out of AV! Those were the days it was too damn easy to make money. Had no idea what I was doing and was still making several $1000's. Those were the days!
Was a good engine for a very long time. However, it relied only on META TAGS and when the adult websites came in strongly they spammed it like anything. Now that its soul has been sold its dead. Yahoo just bought it for the remaining traffic and perhaps to get some good staff.
I used to use altavista all the time for its image search and used webcrawler for page search, but now just use google, then yahoo and msn as backups.
It was my search engine of choice prior to google. Not only I used it to search things but I also used their Email service (it's a pity they abruptly ceased to support the email box I used as my primary one). I also used their Translation service Babelfish (it's still active but I prefer the core it's based on - Systran's own site).