Posts Tagged ‘yahoo’

AltaVista

Everyone’s mourning the death (perhaps prematurely) of delicious but it’s worth nothing that the search engine AltaVista is going to be shut down as well; its time has come, but it’s still somewhat sad to see it go.

altavista logo

Steven Vaughan-Nichols @ ZDNet echoed my sentiments perfectly,

“AltaVista was Google before there was Google.”

If you remember web search in the 90s you, of course, remember Yahoo, but Yahoo along with all of its contemporaries snubbed search in favor of navigating and drilling-down into specific categories. If what you were looking for didn’t fit nicely into a category, it was like finding a needle in a haystack, assuming you were able to find the needle at all. Another not-so-fond memory of web search in the 90s is the continual intrusion of more and more invasive ads. Yahoo was cleaner than most, but sites like Excite peppered their sites with popups and banners; I distinctly remember by system freezing simply from going to excite.com.

AltaVista was revolutionary: sleek, minimal design focusing on text input (though, there was categories at a certain point), good results, and no annoying ads.

So, goodbye AltaVista, and thanks for all the fish.

Why Google won

I firmly believe that Google rose and dominated the search engine market not necessarily because it provided better search results, but because it was the search engine that provided the simplest, cleanest, and most accessible user interface. I bring this up because I caught this image on reddit (my new addiction) the other day. Here’s a cropped piece of the image,

google vs. yahoo

Oddly enough, while many search engines have now adopted a Google-esque simplicity to their interfaces (Live Search, AltaVista, Ask.com, etc.), Yahoo seems to have taken the opposite approach, saturating their homepage with more content – news, top searches, weather, links to other Yahoo services, and a sickening amount of ads. I highly doubt this “everything and the kitchen sink” strategy will put Yahoo back on top.