AltaVista is a web search engine owned by Yahoo!. AltaVista was once one of the most popular search engines but its popularity declined with the rise of Google.
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Origins
AltaVista was created by researchers at Digital Equipment Corporation's Western Research Laboratory who were trying to provide services to make finding files on the public network easier. Although there is some dispute about who was responsible for the original idea, two key participants were Louis Monier, who wrote the crawler, and Michael Burrows, who wrote the indexer. The name AltaVista was chosen in relation to the surroundings of their company at Palo Alto. AltaVista was publicly launched as an internet search engine on 15 December 1995 at altavista.digital.com.At launch, the service had two innovations which set it ahead of the other search engines; It used a fast, multi-threaded crawler (Scooter) which could cover many more Web pages than were believed to exist at the time and an efficient search running back-end on advanced hardware. As of 1998, it used 20 multi-processor machines using DEC's 64-bit Alpha processor. Together, the back-end machines had 130 GB of RAM and 500 GB of hard disk space, and received 13 million queries per day. This made AltaVista the first searchable, full-text database of a large part of the . The distinguishing feature of AltaVista was its minimalistic interface compared with other search engines of the time; a feature which was lost when it became a portal, but was regained when it refocused its efforts on its search function.
AltaVista's site was an immediate success. Traffic increased steadily from 300,000 hits on the first day to more than 80 million hits a day two years later. The ability to search the web, and AltaVista's service in particular, became the subject of numerous articles and even some books.[1] AltaVista itself became one of the top destinations on the web, and by 1997 would earn US$50 million in sponsorship revenue.[2]
Business transactions
In 1996, AltaVista became the exclusive provider of search results for Yahoo!. In 1998, Digital was sold to Compaq and in 1999, Compaq redesigned AltaVista as a web portal, hoping to compete with Yahoo!. Under CEO Rod Schrock, AltaVista abandoned its streamlined search page and focused on features like shopping and free email.[6] In June 1998, Compaq paid AltaVista Technology Incorporated ("ATI") $3.3 million for the domain name altavista.com – Jack Marshall, cofounder of ATI, had registered the name in 1994.In June 1999, Compaq sold a majority stake in AltaVista to CMGI, an internet investment company.[7] CMGI filed for an initial public offering for AltaVista to take place in April 2000, but as the internet bubble collapsed, the IPO was cancelled.[8] Meanwhile, it became clear that AltaVista's portal strategy was unsuccessful, and the search service began losing market share, especially to Google. After a series of layoffs and several management changes, AltaVista gradually shed its portal features and refocused on search. By 2002, AltaVista had improved the quality and freshness of its results and redesigned its user interface.[9]
In February 2003, AltaVista was bought by Overture Services, Inc.[10] In July 2003, Overture itself was taken over by Yahoo!.[11]
Free services
AltaVista provides a free translation service, branded Babel Fish, which automatically translates text between several languages. In May 2008, this service was re-branded as a part of Yahoo!.Yahoo! Live
Yahoo! Live or Y! Live was a Yahoo! service that allowed users to broadcast videos in real time.[1] The service was closed on December 3, 2008.[2]
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History
Yahoo! Live was launched on February 6, 2008 as a "limited preview" and in spite of Yahoo!'s rejection to Microsoft's offer just a few days earlier, the site crashed the same night it was launched due to lack of bandwidth.[3]On November 3, 2008, Yahoo! Live announced that the service would be ended on Dec. 3.
It was officially discontinued at 7:07 P.M. EST on Dec. 3 2008 with the message "kthxbai" posted on the main page.
Features
The design is similar to the one on Justin.tv. The chat system and video windows are as portable as with ustream.tv. Users can create a channel, authorize their webcam and start broadcasting to the public. Other people can watch, or choose to participate via video, sound or text chat; which can be disabled.[5] Users can also set up profiles and track how many people have watched them stream live, how many broadcasts they have made, and how long they have been on the streaming. Unfortunately, videos are not archived for playback, once it’s broadcast, there is no way of recovering the video, and the is no other way of streaming unless it's live, meaning users cannot pre-record videos and then broadcast them.[1]References
- ^ Yahoo Launches Live - A Live Streaming Video Service
- ^ http://www.yliveblog.com/blog/2008/11/03/stopping-our-broadcast/
- ^ Yahoo! Live Quietly Launches, and Loudly Crashes
- ^ Stopping our broadcast…
- ^ Chat control freaks, unite!
External links
- Yahoo! Live (Official Homepage 404)
- Yahoo! Live Blog
- Yahoo! Live's twitter feed
Yahoo! Tech was a web site that provided product information and setup advice to help its users, as expressed in its slogan "Tech Made Easy." Yahoo! launched the web site in May 2006. After almost 4 years, the Yahoo! Tech website was shut down on March 11, 2010.
The site, which was the first new product from the Santa Monica, California-based Yahoo! Media Group, featured a selection of original, licensed, and user-generated content, along with product ratings and reviews for thousands of tech products across 19 product categories. Plus, the site could be personalized using its "My Tech" feature, which allows users to save products that they own and would like to research in the future.
The site's original content included a weekly web-based reality show called Hook Me Up, where Yahoo! users got a tech makeover—as well as four featured "Yahoo! Tech Advisors," who blogged about how gadgets and current technology affect their lives from the four very different demographic segments (The Mom, The Techie Diva, The Working Guy, and the Boomer.) Yahoo! Tech's content partners included Consumer Reports, Wiley Publishing's For Dummies series, and McGraw-Hill; and it incorporated Yahoo!'s community, search, and shopping services.
Former Yahoo! Tech Bloggers
- Gina Hughes
- Christopher Null
- Ben Patterson
- Becky Worley
- Alexander Yoon
- Robin Raskin
- Dory Devlin
- Tom Samiljan
External links
- Yahoo! Tech site
- "Hook Me Up"at Yahoo! Tech
- Yahoo! Tech's "Tech Advisors"
- A video tour of the web site
- Article in Newsweek
- Article in The New York Times
- Article in The Los Angeles Times
The Yahoo! Time Capsule, a brainchild of Jonathan Harris, is a time capsule project by Yahoo! Inc. where users could contribute to a digital legacy of how life was in 2006. The Time Capsule was originally intended to be beamed with a laser into space from a Mexican pyramid in an attempt to communicate with extraterrestrial life.[1] Open to contributions from October 10, 2006 to November 8, 2006, the Time Capsule also hoped to capture the thoughts and feelings of the world in 2006 as an exercise in electronic or "digital anthropology".[2] At the time of the closing of the capsule, the total number of submissions was 170,857. The highest number of contributions, (32,910) came from the 20-29 age group.[3]
Although originally slated to be produced at the Pyramid of the Sun in Teotihuacan, Mexico, Mexican authorities have denied Yahoo permission fearing damage to the ancient historical site.[4] Instead the 2006 Yahoo! Time Capsule culminated in a celebrated production on the Jemez Pueblo in New Mexico. The 18 hour live event spanned the evenings of October 25, 26, and 27th and featured the projection of giant digital images of Time Capsule submissions onto an ancient red rock cliff on the reservation. Each night opened with traditional dancing and music by the people of Jemez Pueblo, set in front of the immense projections and lighting that could be seen for miles through the desert. Recordings of international folk music provided by Smithsonian Folkways Recordings accompanied the live global webcast. The Time Capsule event was designed and produced by Environmental Media Artist, Marc Herring, of Herring Media Group Inc.
The Time Capsule closed on November 8, 2006, after which the digital collection of submissions was entrusted to Smithsonian Folkways Recordings based in Washington D.C., where it will remain until Yahoo!'s 25th Birthday in 2020. It is thought that the capsule represents one of the largest compilations of digital media of its kind in the world.
In addition to being able to contribute text, audio, images and videos, visitors could browse previously included entries, comment on them, or forward them. In return for submitting content to the Time Capsule, Yahoo! asked users to vote for one among a list of seven charities which received a portion of $100,000 from Yahoo! based upon the ratio of votes received by contributors. The charities were the World Wildlife Fund, the International Rescue Committee, the Grameen Foundation, UNICEF, One.org, Seeds of Peace, and the International Child Art Foundation.
See also
- Crypt of Civilization
- Westinghouse Time Capsules
- International Time Capsule Society
References
- ^ Cyntia Barrera Diaz (October 11, 2006). "Time capsule to be beamed from Mexican pyramid". The New Zealand Herald. Reuters. http://www.nzherald.co.nz/technology/news/article.cfm?c_id=5&objectid=10405419. Retrieved 2009-07-01.
- ^ Webmoor, Timothy (December 2, 2008). "From Silicon Valley to the Valley of Teotihuacan: The "Yahoo!s" of New Media and Digital Heritage". Visual Anthropology Review (American Anthropological Association) 24 (2): 183–200. doi:10.1111/j.1548-7458.2008.00012.x. http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/journal/121543375/abstract. Retrieved 2009-07-01.
- ^ Yahoo! Time Capsule - Facts at the Wayback Machine (archived February 8, 2007).
- ^ David Utter (October 12, 2006). "Yahoo Time Capsule Banned From Mexico". WebProNews. http://www.webpronews.com/topnews/2006/10/12/yahoo-time-capsule-banned-from-mexico. Retrieved 2009-07-01.
External links
- Yahoo! Time Capsule
- Reflections on the Time Capsule - Jonathan Harris
- Herring Media Group
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