Digital Decay

An Alternate AltaVista Search Engine History Lesson For Internet Nerds

Why you can’t find the groundbreaking search engine AltaVista on the web anymore. Friends don’t let friends visit Digital.com without knowing the truth.

As someone who has been using the Internet since the early 1990s, I remember AltaVista and some other search engines of the time, before Google came along and gradually overtook all of them. But I hadn’t been aware of what happened to the website in its twilight years.

One day, hubris will catch up with and overwhelm Google in the same way that it did to DEC, and so many other companies…