Why did Alta Vista fail?

[shortylickens]

When I was going to high school in the 1980's we had no clue what a computer was let alone a search engine. Now, my young nephews know all that stuff by the age of 14.

Different times indeed.

14?

Why so late?

 

[ronniedavisk2_9]

Because of Google. Alta vista sucked anyway IMO.

 

[CountZero]

AV was my search engine of choice before google but it wasn't great. It would require multiple searches with refining or sometimes I'd even use different pages to try to find stuff. Getting exactly what you wanted was practically a skill in its own right. Plus all search pages were cluttered messes of ads.

Then google comes along. The most basic looking search page you've ever seen and it gives the best results every time. I think I still used AV as my main page/search engine for a while but time and again google was better and before long I switched.

Basically google was just better and AV failed to be competitive.

 

[amdhunter]

They killed video search at one point and all the guys looking for porn went elsewhere.

 

[Mayne]

I miss napster for its simplicity. Damn you metallica.

 

[SP33Demon]

They got google-ized, is all. :hmm:

My favorite, before Google came along, was HotBot. Always seemed to be able to find more pertinent results with them. Then they were bought out by Lycos, who destroyed them.

Is that what happened to hotbot? Loved that search engine, even moreso than AV.

 

[CZroe]

News flash: the dotcom bubble burst 13 years ago. I'm surprised they lasted as long after that as they did.

Now: what happened to WebCrawler?

 

[Mayne]

fond memories of netscape and trying to make some shitty website on geocities.