I just saw the news that Yahoo! is “sunsetting” Alta Vista, one of the first “good” search engines. This makes me a little misty, as Alta Vista was the search engine I used BG – Before Google – and it had a real shot at *being* Google, had its various owners not utterly screwed it up over the years. Did you know, for example, that at one point Alta Vista was the largest and most widely used search tool on the web? Its driving force, Lois Monier, once told me “search should be a pencil” – he was adamant that Alta Vista not become a portal.
But Alta Vista was owned by DEC, a now dead computer company, which was bought by Compaq, another now dead computer company. And they made it a portal. And through the now defunct Overture, the assets of Alta Vista made their way to Yahoo!, a still alive portal. But now, Alta Vista is going to truly be dead.
It’s hard to watch an important player in the early Internet go away – and it makes me reflect on a couple of things. First, how much or our own culture and history we’re losing day by day, even despite the best efforts of archivists like Brewster Kahle. And secondly, on a personal note, Alta Vista was the search engine that helped me find my birth mother way back in 1995, when my wife was pregnant with our first child, and my life-long wonderings as an adoptee took on a new urgency. Alta Vista pointed me to an online forum for people like me, and there I found a person who helped me find my mother. Pretty cool.
So I’ll miss you, Alta Vista. And if any of you want to know the engine’s journey, well, there’s a book for that.