Dedicated to my late brave, beautiful and silly mummy, Debra Ross. I love you mumster.

Skip navigation

You're either viewing an archived story, or an archived story. To view the latest posts, fling yourself over to the home page, or you can view the complete post index.
Whatever you do, don't go here.

AltaVista Babel Fish is no more

Did that heading grab your attention? Yes, on the same day I posted a comment about how I dislike misleading headlines, I am guilty of doing the same thing. Aren’t I a little stinker?

Yes the language translation service Altavista Babel Fish is no more. If you click on Babel Fish Translation in the footer of the AltaVista home page, you’re redirected to Yahoo Babel Fish.

Yahoo Babelfish

One more nail in the coffin of what was once one of the web’s greatest search engines. I remember back when we first got internet access over 10 years ago, back when I was still a starry eyed child in primary school. AltaVista, HotBot, Looksmart, Infoseek (before it changed to Go), Lycos, Northern Light, GoTo (before Overture), Yahoo… they were sites you went to when you wanted to find things. I remember filling my bookmark toolbar in Netscape with links to these sites so whenever I needed to research an assignment, I’d try each engine one after the other. They all had different directories and different indexes (HotBot aside, but I preferred the style). Now we have Google, Yahoo, Ask… and… Google.

For what it’s worth, I much preferred AltaVista’s slick mountain logo. The new AltaVista is just a shell to Yahoo anyway.

AltaVista circa 1999

2 Comments

  1. Sharon
    Posted 2008.10.05 at 23.44 | Permalink

    Wow yeah back in the early days those above mentioned search engines were popular. Now we only have 3 search engines (Yahoo, Google & Ask)? What about Windows Live search though? But even then, that’s a very small number. I remember one called Northern Light and the logo was nice, it was of some ship in the sea.

  2. Posted 2008.10.07 at 01.26 | Permalink

    Ah yeah I forgot MSN Search / Windows Live Search. I guess I never really used it :)

    Northern Light definitely had the nicest logo of the bunch alongside AltaVista’s mountain image. I miss those days!

    Reminiscing about previous years, does this mean we’re both old people now?

Post a Comment

Your email is never published nor shared. Required fields are marked *
*
*