Does Yahoo!’ s acquisition of AltaVista and AlltheWeb mean that these two popular search engines have their days numbered?
Yahoo! loses prominence
After being ousted from its worldwide leadership in Internet content search by Google, Yahoo! realized early on that it would need to offer the results of a crawler in addition to its own directory results that had brought it to that position. Yahoo! found that users preferred the results returned by search engines to those from directory-type listings. This led Yahoo! to sign an agreement with its competitor Google in June 2000, whereby the latter would act as a provider of crawler-type results for Yahoo! for a period ending in 2004, although it did not seem that this strategy could be viable in the long term for two giants competing for Internet search leadership.