AltaVista

AltaVista opened in December 1995 and for several years was the Google of its day, in terms of providing relevant results and having a loyal group of users that loved the service.Sadly, an attempt to turn AltaVista into a portal site in 1998 saw the company lose track of the importance of search. Over time, relevancy dropped, as did the freshness of AltaVistas listings and the crawlers coverage of the web.Today, AltaVista is once again focused on search. Results come from Yahoo, and tabs above the search box let you go beyond web search to find images, MP3 Audio, Video, Human category listings and News results. If you want a lighter feel than Yahoo but to still have Yahoos results, AltaVista is worth considering.AltaVista was originally owned by Digital, then taken over by Compaq, when that company purchased Digital in 1998. AltaVista was later spun off into a private company, controlled by CMGI. Overture purchasing the search engine in April 2003, then it later became part of Yahoo when Yahoo bought Overture.