What Happened to AltaVista? The Rise and Fall of a Search Pioneer

In 1995, one of the first major search engines came into existence in the form of an experiment born out of the research labs of Digital Equipment Corporation. 

This experiment, called AltaVista, would prove more successful than its team of developers, led by Paul Flaherty, could have ever imagined. It would provide the early adopters of the internet with a one-of-a-kind platform for searching for information in a way that other search engines at the time couldn’t.

It would create what would later become known as the first ever modern search engine, inspiring a period of online search that remains largely unchanged over two decades on. 

But ask anyone what AltaVista is today, and they’d probably have to Google it. Over a quarter of a decade after its launch, the platform is nothing more than a reminisce of a bygone era of the internet and online search. 

This article delves deep into what happened to AltaVista, exploring the rise and fall of the first major search engine and why it failed to take off. 

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