Alta Vista was one of the first major search engines. It competed for the spot of top search engine throughout the late 90s-early 2000s until the emergence of Google.
If you go to altavista.com, you are now redirected to yahoo.com (It's owner).
For such a giant in its field, Altavistas demise was quietly noted by Yahoo. Its shutdown was buried in a list of many other services that Yahoo is shutting down and received a simple one sentence obituary.
Goodbye Altavista....Another relic of my childhood gone forever.