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?
Lots of search engines survive and thrive in “age of Google.” [Why all caps? It’s not an initialsim.]
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Old Search Engines Never Die… They Just Stop Crawling
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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.
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.