
Yahoo shutting down AltaVista and other services - molmalo
http://yahoo.tumblr.com/post/54125001066/keeping-our-focus-on-whats-next
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jaysonelliot
It's surprising to me that Yahoo couldn't find a buyer for such a legendary
brand as AltaVista. If it's just going to be tossed in the bin, give it to
Duck Duck Go or some other company that's actually trying to do something new
with search.

Yahoo's stewardship of the AltaVista brand has been shameful.

~~~
nashequilibrium
DuckDuckGo uses yahoo's search api which is powered by bing. Yahoo research
has released the most innovative papers on search but nobody is there to take
this from research to product. Instead you find google and bing implementing
yahoo's research, its amazing the quality of stuff that comes from there. I
also noticed that a few of yahoo's top researchers going to their rivals and
then working on search. This is why i didn't believe in the Marissa Mayer hire
but i am hoping for the best. She is taking yahoo from a company with high
intelligence to being a more low level media company like AOL, therefore most
of their talent is going to waste, there is so many products they could be
pushing out. The billion they dropped on tumblr could have be used to fund all
those researchers crazy ideas, give them 10mill each to build intelligent
applications that makes peoples everyday life easier, instead of buying CRUD
startups to reach this goal.

If you look at yahoo latest earnings most of their money is coming from the
Alibaba investment and their hedging of the yen, which seems to have been used
to help pay for tumblr. Yahoo cannot buy their way out of this, just like
steve jobs could not buy Apples way out during the 90's instead they had to
use their human capital and innovate their way out. I don;t know who should
have led yahoo but i do know that their biggest strength was their human
capital which is being wasted and marginalized. It's even more evident when
your competitors are implementing the research successfully and going further.

~~~
coffeemug
There is a great Q&A with Steve Jobs (I can't find it right now), where he
explains that you can't sell billions of dollars of product simply by building
interesting (or useful) things -- you have to develop a coherent strategy and
think through how different pieces fit together. Similarly, you can't jump
dump $10m on a hundred research teams, and expect to turn Yahoo around.

I used to be in academia and I'm running a startup now. I'm absolutely certain
that generating computer science research papers, even brilliant ones, is a
heck of a lot easier than the absolutely insane focus required to ship
breakthrough products.

From what I can tell, Yahoo now has a phenomenal environment for people with
this level of focus. As for the castles-in-the-sky research people leaving
Yahoo, it's probably better off for both the research people _and_ Yahoo. It's
got a new business to build -- funding research papers that go nowhere does
nothing to advance that goal.

~~~
kunai
This is the video: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FF-
tKLISfPE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FF-tKLISfPE)

For those not initiated, OpenDoc was a multimedia document format developed by
Apple before Steve Jobs came back to Apple, which was when he violently killed
OpenDoc.

~~~
gcb0
Killed it and allowed Microsoft to boss them around another couple of decades
thanks to office monopoly. Google is now getting close to end this.

~~~
mynameisvlad
Google ending Microsoft Office's monopoly.

That's funny.

~~~
hayksaakian
Honestly not unthinkable in this day and age. Maybe office becomes the
corporate niche thing, and everyone uses g docs or a tablet/phone app at home.

~~~
dredmorbius
I suspect an interpretation, if not grandparent's, is that one monopoly is
being traded for another.

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exhaze
I'll miss AltaVista. I have a fond memory of using it when I was 10 or 11. I
used it to search for "Mortal Kombat 2 combo moves", which led me to GameFAQs.
It actually took a lot of trouble at the time, as I had only moved to the U.S.
a year prior and had trouble formulating the correct phrase before in order to
get that information. I was quite proud of myself.

Amusingly, if you search for that phrase on Google today, GameFAQs doesn't
even show up until the second page.

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codva
I taught a class in "Advanced Search Strategies" back in 97 and 98 that used
Alta Vista to teach Boolean to people that could barely turn on their
computer.

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michaelmior
Am I the only one here was a little surprised to learn that AltaVista was
still alive until now? I don't recall coming across it for several years.

~~~
immigrantsheep
ther'se two of us :)

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sdfjkl
Rest in peace, AltaVista. I have fond memories of you and your babelfish.
Although your name always sounded vaguely profane in my native language.

~~~
psgbg
RIP Altavista and babelfish. One of them showed me a wider world, the other
was the key to open it.

Long before google did become in that huge titan.

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mynameishere
AltaVista was the best search engine before Google came out. Now Firefox's
spellchecker is telling me it's not even a word.

~~~
Sami_Lehtinen
Don't you remember WebCrawler? Ok, it's older than AltaVista, and didn't have
such quality results. But search service called HotBot provided substantially
better results than AltaVista before Google. I remember time of many
specialized search engines. But when Google results started to be fresher and
better, it was clear that time for smaller search engines was simply over.

~~~
jacques_chester
The main point of AltaVista was that it was _fast_.

It was actually marketing for HP-née-Compaq-née-DEC's Alpha servers.

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dredmorbius
More specifically: 64 bit ULTRIX. The search index was held in memory.

~~~
dredmorbius
Correction: Tru64, the Alpha achitecture successor to ULTRIX.

But still: the idea was to demonstrate the massive (for the age) memory
capabilities of 64-bit processing. And it _was_ a rather impressive
demonstration for the time.

Still, it also pointed at the limitation of monolithic single-systems
architectures. For those interested in the history of The New New Thing, for
much of the 1980s and 1990s, focus on supercomputing was on massive NUMA
parallel architectures. What we've seen instead is a gradual increase in core
densities, leveraging economies where these exist, but a principle focus on
distributed, multi-system architectures. With very few exceptions,
supercomputers and massive public-facing Web architectures focus on designs of
redundant, mass deployments of essentially similar (not necessarily identical)
commodity x86 (and successor) hardware. Or GPU hardware for quantitatively
intensive applications.

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jleader
I worked at Yahoo from 2002 to 2008 (admittedly, not at headquarters in
Sunnyvale), and the only one of those services I've ever heard of is Alta
Vista.

~~~
gcb0
If you never heard of the term extraction tool or yql during that time you
don't know what you missed.

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drewcoo
So I kept expecting the cool geeky story about AltaVista to surface in all of
my geek news feeds. But it didn't.

Does nobody remember how the service used to run on the DEC Alpha (aka "tin
cup") and how they would stuff more RAM in every time a server would swap? Or
did I remember that wrong?

The tin cup story (and DEC in general) and also the way AltaVista used to run
are _amazing_ geek history, imho.

Sorry for being late to the story, but this is a lot cooler than the JS hack
of the day. Are there any old veterans here who can tell some of the story?

[Edit] FWIW, the Alpha architecture is still my personal favorite of the dozen
or so I've worked on.

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RandallBrown
Is alta vista anything more than a frontend to yahoo search, which is just a
frontend to Bing?

I'd love to hear from a person that still uses AltaVista as their main search
engine. I can't imagine what their reasoning would be.

~~~
taopao
Time travelers from the year 1997. Not a big demo.

~~~
moheeb
John Titor still uses AltaVista.

~~~
jaredsohn
Doubtful. John Titor traveled back in time from the future so if he remains in
his past, he likely changed his search preferences with the native people.

I cannot think of a good example right now of someone who traveled from the
1990s to the 2010s or so, although this guide could be helpful:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_television_series_that_...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_television_series_that_include_time_travel)

Non-timetravelers who might be within that demographic are people who just
woke up from 15-year comas, people formerly cryogenically frozen, people
leaving prison (that doesn't allow Internet access), etc.

~~~
shardling
The Terminator TV show had Sarah+John Connor jump from 1999 to 2007 in the
first episode.

------
ndrake
"you won't find us on Alta Vista" \-
[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8UGtlUMMkOU](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8UGtlUMMkOU)

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subpixel
I'm aging myself, but I remember falling in love with AltaVists in college.
I'd pick a subject I was interested in - say, x - and in one sitting I could
discover _every_ practitioner of x on the web. And every day that part of the
web would grow a little bit. Those were exciting times, when the web was
growing right under your feet.

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human_error
I've looked at the list and I don't think any value would be lost due to these
services.

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regularfry
Intriguing that YQL is surviving. Anyone here using it for anything
interesting?

~~~
Pwnguinz
Apparently one of the features is that you can use it to easily scrape other
websites! The only overhead would be one network API call (the fetching and
parsing of information all happens on the Yahoo! servers and it returns the
sanitized output to your application). I might give it a spin sometimes :).

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badclient
Altavista had this great feature of only searching within a set of results. To
date I still can't find an easy way to do this.

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pitzips
Don't you dare touch yahoo pipes, Yahoo.

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caseorganic
Glad to see that Yahoo isn't shutting down Pipes yet. I still run a lot of
data through that system.

~~~
icebraining
Same here. I immediately searched for it on the page.

It's the only Yahoo service I use (well, except for Tumblr, I suppose), but
it's great.

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Surio
Too late to mention here now, but I actually use Lycos still (along with a few
others), and it is pretty nifty at returning search query results:

[http://www.lycos.com/](http://www.lycos.com/)

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PanMan
Hmm, I quite liked their term extraction API and used it in some hacks. If I
recall they were planning to shut it down before, but didn't after many
complaints. It seems I'll need to look into YQL now.

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rocky1138
What is "What's Next?"

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taopao
Cue the usual HN wailing and gnashing of teeth that accompanies project
cancellations:

Yahoo! Axis (June 28, 2013) Yahoo! Browser Plus (June 28, 2013) Citizen Sports
(June 28, 2013) Yahoo! WebPlayer (June 30, 2013) FoxyTunes (July 1, 2013)
Yahoo! RSS Alerts (July 1, 2013) Yahoo! Neighbors Beta (July 8, 2013)
AltaVista (July 8, 2013) Yahoo! Stars India (July 25, 2013) Yahoo! Downloads
Beta (July 31, 2013) Yahoo! Local API (September 28, 2013) Yahoo! Term
Extraction API (September 28, 2013)

~~~
rgbrenner
I don't think there is anyone that is going to complain about AltaVista. I
didn't even know that it was still alive. I thought that died a decade ago. I
just learned two things: altavista was not dead, and Yahoo bought them at some
point.. when did that happen?

Yahoo really let AltaVista die a long slow death. I assume they were waiting
for that one last user to sign off.

Edit: I didn't vote you down, btw..

