Venerable AltaVista Dies

After last week's news of the demise of AlltheWeb, I suppose I should not be too surprised that the same has now happened at AltaVista. But it is a real loss. The AltaVista Web database has been replaced with a version of the Yahoo! Search database. In addition to the change in the underlying database, there have been many search feature changes:

• Truncation gone
• NEAR operator gone
• Other proximity searching gone
• Case sensitive searching gone
• Field searches gone: anchor, applet, image, text, like
• Region limit gone

On the plus side, there are now more file type limits. But the results are basically the same as at AlltheWeb, and both of those seem to only be a subset of the Yahoo! Search database which finds more results on some searches.

So it there any reason to keep using AltaVista? Probably not for the Web database, but the Video and MP3/Audio databases are not yet available at Yahoo! Search and may be worth a visit.