Yahoo shutting down AltaVista and other services | Hacker News Reader

Yahoo shutting down AltaVista and other services

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89 pointsmolmalo59 comments

It's surprising to me that Yahoo couldn't find a buyer for such a legendary brand as AltaVista. If it's just going to be tossed in the bin, give it to Duck Duck Go or some other company that's actually trying to do something new with search.

Yahoo's stewardship of the AltaVista brand has been shameful.

Agreed. The AV search site has been a facade for other underlying search engines for a while, and I'm not sure what would cost so much about it in it's present form.

For me, AV was one of the first search engines that really took search forward a step, especially improving the quality and presentation of search results.

I bet they just never thought of it as valuable, since it wasn't making them any money. If Mr. Weinberg was able to get through to the people with yes-power, they'd probably just shrug and hand it over. (I'm assuming here that there's a technocrat with marketing chops sitting in that chair, who can see what such a "gift" buys them in terms of developer street-cred. That might be sadly optimistic, but if it is, then it's exactly the thing Mayer is trying to fix--getting all their best wood behind the important arrows.)

If this was a decade ago, I would agree with you.. but altavista has been practically dead for so long, I can't imagine who would buy it. It would be like asking who wants to buy WebVan or Pets.com... sure lots of people still remember the name, but what they stood for, what kind of company they were, etc is long gone, and no one is going to think for a second that the new company is associated with the original Altavista... they'll just be one more search engine out there.

DuckDuckGo uses yahoo's search api which is powered by bing. Yahoo research has released the most innovative papers on search but nobody is there to take this from research to product. Instead you find google and bing implementing yahoo's research, its amazing the quality of stuff that comes from there. I also noticed that a few of yahoo's top researchers going to their rivals and then working on search. This is why i didn't believe in the Marissa Mayer hire but i am hoping for the best. She is taking yahoo from a company with high intelligence to being a more low level media company like AOL, therefore most of their talent is going to waste, there is so many products they could be pushing out. The billion they dropped on tumblr could have be used to fund all those researchers crazy ideas, give them 10mill each to build intelligent applications that makes peoples everyday life easier, instead of buying CRUD startups to reach this goal.

If you look at yahoo latest earnings most of their money is coming from the Alibaba investment and their hedging of the yen, which seems to have been used to help pay for tumblr. Yahoo cannot buy their way out of this, just like steve jobs could not buy Apples way out during the 90's instead they had to use their human capital and innovate their way out. I don;t know who should have led yahoo but i do know that their biggest strength was their human capital which is being wasted and marginalized. It's even more evident when your competitors are implementing the research successfully and going further.

There is a great Q&A with Steve Jobs (I can't find it right now), where he explains that you can't sell billions of dollars of product simply by building interesting (or useful) things -- you have to develop a coherent strategy and think through how different pieces fit together. Similarly, you can't jump dump $10m on a hundred research teams, and expect to turn Yahoo around.

I used to be in academia and I'm running a startup now. I'm absolutely certain that generating computer science research papers, even brilliant ones, is a heck of a lot easier than the absolutely insane focus required to ship breakthrough products.

From what I can tell, Yahoo now has a phenomenal environment for people with this level of focus. As for the castles-in-the-sky research people leaving Yahoo, it's probably better off for both the research people and Yahoo. It's got a new business to build -- funding research papers that go nowhere does nothing to advance that goal.

This is the video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FF-tKLISfPE

For those not initiated, OpenDoc was a multimedia document format developed by Apple before Steve Jobs came back to Apple, which was when he violently killed OpenDoc.

Wish he was alive for a few more years :(

Killed it and allowed Microsoft to boss them around another couple of decades thanks to office monopoly. Google is now getting close to end this.

Google ending Microsoft Office's monopoly.

That's funny.

Honestly not unthinkable in this day and age. Maybe office becomes the corporate niche thing, and everyone uses g docs or a tablet/phone app at home.

I suspect an interpretation, if not grandparent's, is that one monopoly is being traded for another.

gdocs still has a long way to go. It's a harmless toy compared to Office, and I'm very far from being a power user.

Well, my place of work uses google drive exclusively. That's 60.000 people less paying office licenses for Microsoft...

This is the power of branding. Even if Yahoo came out with better search technology than Google, it would be incredibly difficult to unseat it now - you would need to be at least one order of magnitude better, like Google was compared to Altavista when it stole its crown. And even in that case Yahoo would need to use a different brand anyway (like Microsoft is trying to do with Bing)

Steve Jobs certainly had a keen eye for business. You can tell from interviews. Probably one of the greatest businessmen in tech. To me, it's his greatest legacy.

Which are those papers you are talking about? I would love to read them at some point. Do you have them at hand?

Edit: Here they are: http://www.research.yahoo.com/publication

I can only imagine that the name is toxic now, and would probably convey negative value to a site like DDG. It was great back in the day, but now it's the butt of jokes if it's lucky.

I'm not so sure. I'm 22 and most people in my generation wouldn't know what AltaVista is. As would most non-techie I believe. And for the people who know what it is, the brand has absolutely no value.

As an ex-AltaVista employee, I don't really care about the brand; I care more about the underlying technology.

I'll miss AltaVista. I have a fond memory of using it when I was 10 or 11. I used it to search for "Mortal Kombat 2 combo moves", which led me to GameFAQs. It actually took a lot of trouble at the time, as I had only moved to the U.S. a year prior and had trouble formulating the correct phrase before in order to get that information. I was quite proud of myself.

Amusingly, if you search for that phrase on Google today, GameFAQs doesn't even show up until the second page.

I taught a class in "Advanced Search Strategies" back in 97 and 98 that used Alta Vista to teach Boolean to people that could barely turn on their computer.

Am I the only one here was a little surprised to learn that AltaVista was still alive until now? I don't recall coming across it for several years.

ther'se two of us :)

Rest in peace, AltaVista. I have fond memories of you and your babelfish. Although your name always sounded vaguely profane in my native language.

RIP Altavista and babelfish. One of them showed me a wider world, the other was the key to open it.

Long before google did become in that huge titan.

Hehe. Now you have to elaborate on the naming...

The search results were not great, but the times were great.

AltaVista was the best search engine before Google came out. Now Firefox's spellchecker is telling me it's not even a word.

Don't you remember WebCrawler? Ok, it's older than AltaVista, and didn't have such quality results. But search service called HotBot provided substantially better results than AltaVista before Google. I remember time of many specialized search engines. But when Google results started to be fresher and better, it was clear that time for smaller search engines was simply over.

The main point of AltaVista was that it was fast.

It was actually marketing for HP-née-Compaq-née-DEC's Alpha servers.

More specifically: 64 bit ULTRIX. The search index was held in memory.

Correction: Tru64, the Alpha achitecture successor to ULTRIX.

But still: the idea was to demonstrate the massive (for the age) memory capabilities of 64-bit processing. And it was a rather impressive demonstration for the time.

Still, it also pointed at the limitation of monolithic single-systems architectures. For those interested in the history of The New New Thing, for much of the 1980s and 1990s, focus on supercomputing was on massive NUMA parallel architectures. What we've seen instead is a gradual increase in core densities, leveraging economies where these exist, but a principle focus on distributed, multi-system architectures. With very few exceptions, supercomputers and massive public-facing Web architectures focus on designs of redundant, mass deployments of essentially similar (not necessarily identical) commodity x86 (and successor) hardware. Or GPU hardware for quantitatively intensive applications.

Dogpile was pretty awesome for a while in those days..

I'm almost sure AltaVista was just the first one to have porn... Mean, image search.

I worked at Yahoo from 2002 to 2008 (admittedly, not at headquarters in Sunnyvale), and the only one of those services I've ever heard of is Alta Vista.

If you never heard of the term extraction tool or yql during that time you don't know what you missed.

So I kept expecting the cool geeky story about AltaVista to surface in all of my geek news feeds. But it didn't.

Does nobody remember how the service used to run on the DEC Alpha (aka "tin cup") and how they would stuff more RAM in every time a server would swap? Or did I remember that wrong?

The tin cup story (and DEC in general) and also the way AltaVista used to run are amazing geek history, imho.

Sorry for being late to the story, but this is a lot cooler than the JS hack of the day. Are there any old veterans here who can tell some of the story?

[Edit] FWIW, the Alpha architecture is still my personal favorite of the dozen or so I've worked on.

Is alta vista anything more than a frontend to yahoo search, which is just a frontend to Bing?

I'd love to hear from a person that still uses AltaVista as their main search engine. I can't imagine what their reasoning would be.

Time travelers from the year 1997. Not a big demo.

John Titor still uses AltaVista.

Doubtful. John Titor traveled back in time from the future so if he remains in his past, he likely changed his search preferences with the native people.

I cannot think of a good example right now of someone who traveled from the 1990s to the 2010s or so, although this guide could be helpful: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_television_series_that_...

Non-timetravelers who might be within that demographic are people who just woke up from 15-year comas, people formerly cryogenically frozen, people leaving prison (that doesn't allow Internet access), etc.

The Terminator TV show had Sarah+John Connor jump from 1999 to 2007 in the first episode.

Alta Vista did do enterprise search for a while. I remember in 2003-5 we had a large company choosing between Alta Vista and a Google appliance, the two players at the time. We were pushing them to go Google but they went Alta Vista. Worked decently well though, good search and decent API, the Google appliance was more black box at the time and Alta Vista was kinda flexible/customizable. So they had that.

Also Alta Vista Babel Fish was one of the first good translation services.

"you won't find us on Alta Vista" - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8UGtlUMMkOU

I'm aging myself, but I remember falling in love with AltaVists in college. I'd pick a subject I was interested in - say, x - and in one sitting I could discover _every_ practitioner of x on the web. And every day that part of the web would grow a little bit. Those were exciting times, when the web was growing right under your feet.

I've looked at the list and I don't think any value would be lost due to these services.

Intriguing that YQL is surviving. Anyone here using it for anything interesting?

Apparently one of the features is that you can use it to easily scrape other websites! The only overhead would be one network API call (the fetching and parsing of information all happens on the Yahoo! servers and it returns the sanitized output to your application). I might give it a spin sometimes :).

I use YQL and Pipes for this Twitter analyzer. I'd be sad to see it go. It's great technology for what it does, but I'm not sure enough people know how to take advantage of it or trust its stability or longevity.

http://xefer.com/twitter

Altavista had this great feature of only searching within a set of results. To date I still can't find an easy way to do this.

Don't you dare touch yahoo pipes, Yahoo.

Glad to see that Yahoo isn't shutting down Pipes yet. I still run a lot of data through that system.

Same here. I immediately searched for it on the page.

It's the only Yahoo service I use (well, except for Tumblr, I suppose), but it's great.

Too late to mention here now, but I actually use Lycos still (along with a few others), and it is pretty nifty at returning search query results:

http://www.lycos.com/

Hmm, I quite liked their term extraction API and used it in some hacks. If I recall they were planning to shut it down before, but didn't after many complaints. It seems I'll need to look into YQL now.

What is "What's Next?"

Cue the usual HN wailing and gnashing of teeth that accompanies project cancellations:

Yahoo! Axis (June 28, 2013) Yahoo! Browser Plus (June 28, 2013) Citizen Sports (June 28, 2013) Yahoo! WebPlayer (June 30, 2013) FoxyTunes (July 1, 2013) Yahoo! RSS Alerts (July 1, 2013) Yahoo! Neighbors Beta (July 8, 2013) AltaVista (July 8, 2013) Yahoo! Stars India (July 25, 2013) Yahoo! Downloads Beta (July 31, 2013) Yahoo! Local API (September 28, 2013) Yahoo! Term Extraction API (September 28, 2013)

I don't think there is anyone that is going to complain about AltaVista. I didn't even know that it was still alive. I thought that died a decade ago. I just learned two things: altavista was not dead, and Yahoo bought them at some point.. when did that happen?

Yahoo really let AltaVista die a long slow death. I assume they were waiting for that one last user to sign off.

Edit: I didn't vote you down, btw..

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