WhereIsAtlas · AltaVista
What Happened to AltaVista?
The web's first great search engine, once the internet's front door — switched off by Yahoo in 2013.
AltaVista was one of the first and most popular search engines on the internet, built by Digital Equipment Corporation in the mid-1990s. It changed hands several times and was finally shut down by Yahoo in July 2013.
The web's first great search engine
AltaVista was launched in 1995 by a team of researchers at Digital Equipment Corporation. It was built on the idea of a fast, comprehensive index of the entire web, and its software could crawl and rank a far larger slice of the internet than the search tools that came before it. For a generation of early internet users, AltaVista was simply what you used to find anything.
The search boom and the portal era
At its height AltaVista was among the most-visited sites on the internet, and in the late 1990s it was reshaped into a full portal with news, email and other services. It was a household name at a time when the web itself was new, and for millions of people it was the front door to everything online.
The handovers
AltaVista's independence was short-lived. Following Digital Equipment's sale to Compaq, the search engine was spun out and eventually bought by Yahoo in 1999. It had a succession of owners and relaunches, but never fully recovered its early dominance as Google and others redefined search.
Where AltaVista is now
Yahoo shut down AltaVista in July 2013. The brand and its technology are gone, but the idea it pioneered — a fast, comprehensive index of the web you could search in a single box — became the model for the search engines we all use today.
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Sources
- AltaVista - Wikipedia — Wikipedia (2026-09-05)
- Yahoo to shut down pioneering AltaVista search site — BBC News (2026-09-05)