What happened to AltaVista?

Recently I was thinking, what happened to AltaVista? This was a very popular search engine in the early days of the internet, yet here is another early internet business that is no longer around. Founded in 1995, AltaVista's traffic is now redirected to Yahoo's search engine after being purchased by Yahoo! in 2003 that has now been redirected to Microsoft's Bing search engine - who would have thought?

Google has dominated internet search after Microsoft's Internet Explorer has lost favour with consumers. While AltaVista was not as dominant as Google's search engine; it was a serviceable search engine along with Yahoo!, Netscape Explorer and Lycos. While some of AltaVista's innovations made it through to Yahoo!, the name AltaVista has been relegated to internet history.