5 Years Ago... Compaq Spends $3m On Altavista.com Address

from the how-quickly-things-change dept

How quickly things change. Back in the early days of the web, Digital Equipment Corporate set up a nice little search engine called AltaVista, that they ran at altavista.digital.com. Originally, they took a very Google-esque strategy of selling their technology to other sites to use (such as Yahoo!), and leaving their search site pretty basic (though, not as basic as Google's). The original point of AltaVista, though, was to highlight the power of DEC's servers. Eventually, DEC was sold to Compaq and a decision was made for Altavista to go portal. Unfortunately, it was a lot tougher without the Altavista.com domain name. So, five years ago, Compaq shelled out $3 million for the altavista.com domain. Since then the company was sold to CMGI, spun off as its own company, bought by Overture, and now is in the process of being bought by Yahoo!. Somewhere in there, they ditched the whole portal thing and went back to just being a search engine. Quite a ride.

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