AltaVista, one of the web's best and most popular search engines in its formative years, is likely to be shut down.
Currently owned by Yahoo, it is one of eight services scheduled for 'sunsetting', alongside Deliciousm Yahoo Buzz, MyBlogLog and others.
Launching in 1995, AltaVista had a minimalist interface unlike other search sites (which would later be adopted by Google), and covered more pages than were previously believed to even exist. Within a couple of years of launching it was getting over 80 million hits a day.
However after rebranding itself as a portal in the late 1990s and branching out into other areas like email and shopping, it lost market share to the up-and-coming Google search engine.
In February 2003 it was sold to Overture for only US$140 million, despite being valued at $2.3 billion in 1999.
Overture was later acquired by Yahoo.
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