Yahoo acquired the AltaVista technology, index and name when it bought ad firm Overture in 2003. After the shutdown anyone seeking the AltaVista site will be redirected to the main Yahoo search page. AltaVista was launched in 1995 when search engines generally did a poor job of logging information on the web's rapidly growing population of sites.

AltaVista was a groundbreaking search engine created by Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) in 1995. It was one of the earliest and most popular keyword-based search tools on the World Wide Web in the mid-90s and is widely considered to be the first major search engine in history.

Owner Yahoo on Monday officially killed off AltaVista, which was once one of the Web's most popular search engines. If you visit the site now, it will redirects to Yahoo's own search page. Palo Alto-based AltaVista made its debut back in December 1995. For those keeping track, that's three years before Google was founded.

To borrow from the present, AltaVista was the Google of its era. In 1996, it was arguably the best and most-loved brand on the Web. It presaged many of the current innovations and opportunities in search, from automatic language translation to audio and video search to clustering of results.