London: Internet Corporation, Yahoo is reportedly going to shut down the services of pioneering search site AltaVista on 8 July.

AltaVista was hugely popular when it was launched in 1995 because it had indexed 20 million webpages and developed its own 'crawler' technology that did the job of finding webpages and logging what was on them, reports BBC.
 

Yahoo had acquired the AltaVista technology, index and name when it bought ad firm Overture in 2003.

According to the report, AltaVista used fast computers behind the scenes to return results quickly and this made it one of the top web destinations till 2001 when number of searches conducted via Google overtook it.

The AltaVista software was created by US computer scientists Paul Flaherty and Louis Monier and Briton Michael Burrows while all three worked in the research labs of DEC (Digital Equipment Corporation).

The report said that AltaVista was sold off in 1999 to a venture capital firm who prepared an IPO that was abandoned in the wake of the dotcom crash of 2001 and was later bought by Overture in 2003 and Yahoo acquired it a year later.

Search analyst Danny Sullivan said that the search service was 'loved' during its brief heyday and that it deserved a better send off than Yahoo had given it through its blogpost, the report added.

ANI