[Info-vax] AltaVista background information

[Paul Sture]

On Sat, 15 Oct 2011 18:05:38 -0400
JF Mezei <jfmezei.spamnot at vaxination.ca> wrote:

> MG wrote:
> > Recently I thought about AltaVista, the search engine I used in the
> 
> 
> Alta Vista was one of the rare mafketing attempts by Digital to
> showcase what its Alpha chip could do. And they had a fair success
> and exposure with it because people knew it ran on Alpha.
> 
> Unfortunatly, as part of the many divestitures to prepare Digital to
> be purchased by Compaq, it was spun off and faded into obscurity and
> its leftovers were purchased by Yahoo. (which which was not an Alpha
> shop).
> 

I believe it was sold for shares in some up and coming company whose
shares later collapsed. Here we are:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AltaVista

"In June 1999, Compaq sold a majority stake in AltaVista to CMGI, an
internet investment company.[9] CMGI filed for an initial public
offering for AltaVista to take place in April 2000, but as the internet
bubble collapsed, the IPO was cancelled.[10] Meanwhile, it became clear
that AltaVista's portal strategy was unsuccessful, and the search
service began losing market share, especially to Google. After a series
of layoffs and several management changes, AltaVista gradually shed its
portal features and refocused on search. By 2002, AltaVista had
improved the quality and freshness of its results and redesigned its
user interface"