The first good-enough web search engine is officially shutting down in a few days. I remember when they popped up—they had about an order of magnitude more pages indexed than their competition, and they frequently actually returned relevant pages!
They were eventually displaced by Google.
Alta Vista was started as a demonstration of DECs relational database technology, and was pretty impressive from that point of view, too.
To memorialize my first favorite search engine, I’ve made screen captures of what they return for a number of personally relevant searches today.
