AltaVista is dead. Here's why it's so hard to compete with Google.
Washington Post
Today, the U.S. market is dominated by just two companies: Microsoft (whose technology also powers Yahoo's search engine) and Google (whose technology also powers the AOL and Ask search engines). Internationally, Yandex and Baidu have significant ... I think you’d have to ask them but it seems like they’re spending on the order of $10 million per year on it. There were a ton of search engines in the 90s. It was a much cheaper problem. Also, before Google came along [the incumbents] weren’t very good. Altavista was the best one before Google came along. (read more at link above)
