AltaVista
AltaVista was bought & devoured by Yahoo, it no longer exists as a standalone search engine. The information in this article is being kept up for historical purposes only. No claim to current accuracy is made.
AltaVista was the first modern search engine as we know them today. Previously there was only Yahoo, which was vastly limited by being reliant on human editors. In contract AltaVista used a program (also known as a robot or spider) and so was able to build an index of millions of pages. AltaVista was not alone for long however because Lycos was soon introduced as well. AltaVista was generally known as the fastest engine, and Lycos the biggest index. In those days of 14.4 kbps modems speed was a big issue and so AltaVista became very popular, and it held on to its popularity for a very long time.
It's hard to pinpoint one factor that lead to the relative downfall of AltaVista, instead many factors contributed. Since AltaVista was very popular at the time it was also very important to have a good listing in them many people resorted to unethical means of gaining better listings. Some of you may remember pages that had an endless amount of invisible text loaded with every keyword under the rainbow, these pages were made primarily to get higher rankings in AltaVista. So as time went on AltaVista served more and more irrelevant results. Another factor was that AltaVista went through many design changes, not all of them good. They tried to offer much more services than just searching, and wanted to pay for it all with advertising revenue, and in a story that is all too common in this industry when the ads bottomed out so did AltaVista's revenue stream. This fact, combined perhaps with the success of Google's simplistic approach, is why AltaVista has now returned to a more search-centered layout. The fall in advertising revenue had another indirect effect at AltaVista, they went for many months without updating their index and this further alienated people, especially webmasters. One can only assume that the reason was because of financial turmoil at the company.
AltaVista seems to have most of it's problems sorted out and has started indexing again, it is still a popular search engine, though it does not enjoy the market share it once did. Whether or not it will ever again challenge Google for supremacy remains to be seen. Also AltaVista is now using a very Google-like algorithm with a high emphasis on link popularity, and they have copied Google's layout and presentation of ads very closely as well.
AltaVista now offers a variety of different submission methods. You can pay to quickly add up to 500 pages with their "Express Inclusion," or over 500 pages with their "Trusted Feed," AltaVista also now offers users the ability to customize their listing with a custom title, abstract, and even graphics. However you will do fine if you just use their plain free "Basic Submit."
AltaVista's spider is known as "Scooter" and once it visits your site it will usually only be a short while before your listing is in their index. However because of the recent turmoil at AltaVista its hard for me to tell you how often they update their index, their website though still states "4 weeks" as it has for a long time.
Getting a high ranking in AltaVista isn't much different than with Google. Though AltaVista isn't as open about how they rank sites, they do follow Google's lead and use link popularity. AltaVista also looks for keywords in your site's content. In their results AltaVista includes sponsored results at the top which are from Overture or other sponsors. AltaVista also uses LookSmart to power their directory.
Overture recently purchased both AltaVista and AllTheWeb, what will happen to these two search engines we don't yet know.
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