What Happens to Old Search Engines?

[ralph124c]

Remember internet search engines like "ALTA VISTA", "Ask Jeeves", etc.? In this age of GOOGLE, why does anybody need other search engines? I gues once advertisers stop reimbusing a SE for hits, it is dead. Anyway, do any other search engines survive?

[Q.E.D.]

AltaVista is still around, and Ask Jeeves was simply renamed Ask.com.

[Exapno Mapcase]

SearchEngineWatch.com.

Lots of search engines survive and thrive in "age of Google." [Why all caps? It's not an initialsim.]

[Colophon]

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Old Search Engines Never Die... They Just Stop Crawling
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[Will Repair]

I do a lot of searching on the web and I get different results from Google and Alta Vista. So sometimes I find what I need on Alta Vista. Google ranking can be bad if you're looking for an obscure document. I use both because they're the only ones that search .pdf documents.

[carterba]

AltaVista was bought by Yahoo (along with Overture, Inktomi, and some other company I can't recall right now). If you do a search on AltaVista and hover your mouse over one of the returned links, you'll see that it's going through yahoo.com. I suspect AltaVista results are the same as Yahoo results now.

That's what happens to old search engines: they get bought and their technologies assimilated.

[Fear Itself]

And sometimes they just shut down.

[AHunter3]

Originally Posted by carterba

AltaVista was bought by Yahoo (along with Overture, Inktomi, and some other company I can't recall right now). If you do a search on AltaVista and hover your mouse over one of the returned links, you'll see that it's going through yahoo.com. I suspect AltaVista results are the same as Yahoo results now.

That's what happens to old search engines: they get bought and their technologies assimilated.

Alta Vista used to have a fantastic boolean search engine. When they got bought out, that kind of went by the wayside.

AllTheWeb.com still has a boolean search field, but it's just not the same.