It’s time for another episode of: Search Industry Flashbacks!
Date: 3 July 2002Original Post: AltaVista Boasts Larger Index
Summary: It’s July 2002 and AltaVista have been steadily losing market share to Google and Yahoo for some years. In an attempt to turn things around, they dramatically increased the number of files being indexed and updated their news feed:
Content:
According to AltaVista, their index now contains 1.1 billion pages, representing over 120 million video, audio and image files. They’ve also increased the frequency of their news feeds, updating news sources every 15 minutes.
Not only that, but AltaVista have also improved their Express Inclusion offering by increasing their refresh rate. Effective August 1, 2002, all URL’s using their Express Inclusion service will be visited on a daily basis.
They said it couldn’t be done, but it seems AltaVista are proving the critics wrong by finally turning things around and offering a better user experience. Let’s hope this new customer focus will help them regain market share lost over the past 12 months.
Postscript: At the time, I (rather optimistically) thought it could be AltaVista’s big comeback. How wrong was I?
