thearchivist.funYahoo switches off AltaVista
Search Engine Roundtable reported on 1 July 2013 that Yahoo had announced, late the previous Friday, that AltaVista would shut for good on 8 July 2013. Yahoo made the announcement in a Tumblr post titled 'Keeping our focus on what's next.' The author wrote that the closing was expected, and linked to a eulogy by Danny Sullivan. Google Fellow Jeff Dean was quoted as saying that AltaVista was how he first became interested in building large-scale information retrieval systems. AltaVista's founder Louis Monier was named in the report. A search engine's pages are rarely archived, because the pages it produced were generated for each query. What survives of AltaVista is largely descriptions, screenshots and the memories of people who used it.
Context and provenance
The article does not give AltaVista's launch year or ownership history, so this record makes no claim about them. That omission is deliberate; add it when a source is read for it.
AltaVista's search results were generated per query, so there is no complete set of pages to cite. A citation for the closing should use Yahoo's Tumblr notice if you can find a surviving copy, together with the dated report used here. For what AltaVista was like to use, look for dated screenshots and say so.
Transmission timeline
- 2013-06-28
Yahoo announces the closing (inferred from 'late Friday' in a 1 July article).
- 2013-07-08
AltaVista is scheduled to shut for good.
Why it matters
AltaVista's closing was widely expected, and its significance is recorded mostly in what people who built later search systems said about it.
What remains uncertain
The announcement date is inferred, not stated. Launch year and ownership history are not claimed.
Sources and evidence
- Search Engine Roundtable: Goodbye, AltaVista
8 July 2013 shutdown, Yahoo's Tumblr announcement, Jeff Dean's remark, mention of Louis Monier.
Editorial review: 2026-10-22. New evidence may change this account.