AltaVista, one of the original major search engines of the early online age, will be permanently shut down on July 8th, its parent Yahoo! has revealed.

Before Google's rise after the dot-com boom, AltaVista was among the first search engines to index large quanties of content and quickly became popular.

Launched in 1995, AltaVista had soon indexed over 20 million pages using spiders to crawl through content - a pioneering technique essentially replicated by Google.





The software behind AltaVista was owned by American company DEC, before being sold to Compaq in 1998. AltaVista was then sold to a venture capital firm a year later, whose doomed IPO was abandoned in after the dot-com crash in 2001. AltaVista became part of online advertising company Overture in 2003, who were then absorbed by Yahoo!.

The closure are amongst a host of moves by Yahoo! CEO Marissa Mayer, whose aggressive acquisitions, policies and now closures are designed to make Yahoo! relevant in the age of Apple and Google.