Has-been company sold at garage sale
The once-dominant Internet search engine AltaVista has been sold to Overture for $60m in cash and $80m in shares, pocket fluff compared to the $2.4bn paid for it by CMGI in 1998.
The AltaVista search engine, which once held the position Google holds now, was originally developed by DEC to show off its hardware, but through aquisitions, first Compaq, again swallowed by Hewlett-Packard, the showcase value was gradually eroded.
Mostly, the value of the search engine was diminished by sale of prominent placement on searches, making it less and less likely you found what you really were searching for and more likely you just got advertising. In addition it became a cottage industry to advise people on how to boost your rankings on its searches, with elaborate meta tags and a significant number of ever-changing tricks. When google came along, with superiour technology and business ethics, AltaVista was dead in the water.
Overture, who purchased it, is a company specialising in rigging search results on search engines. Say no more.
RIP AltaVista.