One of the first search engines to appear was Altavista, developed by Digital Equipment to help users find information on the web. Like many nascent technology companies, it spiked, then fell back and was eventually taken over.
After AltaVista's star faded, it changed hands a number of times and ended up as part of the Yahoo empire – as did long time rival AOL. And Yahoo has just been sold to Verizon for $4.8bn – significantly less than its peak valuation of $125bn and about $40bn shy of Microsoft’s unsolicited offer made in 2008.
Google, however, marches on yet, despite its apparent ubiquity, it ‘only’ holds a 70% market share, according to netmarketshare.com, which notes Yahoo’s share is just shy of 8%.
Search engines are, of course, things of the past. We all use portals now and those portals generate massive amounts of advertising revenue for the operators. and, even with an 8% market share, it appears there was serious competition to buy the business.
