RIP AltaVista

AltaVista, once the best search engine in the world, was put to rest by Yahoo! The announcement of its demise was made on June 28 as part of some other services Yahoo! was shutting down. When you visit AltaVista.com as of July 8, you will be automatically re-directed to Yahoo.com.

Yahoo! Clues, more data about agreggate searching habits

According to an Information Today Newsbreak story by Greg R. Notess on November 29, 02010 about Yahoo! Clues, "Yahoo! Clues presents information about popular searches that have been done by the “millions of people who use Yahoo! to search each day.” Similar to Google Trends and Google Insights for Search, Clues has both similar and unique data points. The data available includes search volume, searcher demographics (age group, gender, and income), searcher location, search flow, and related searches. This free tool can be used to get a sense of the types of data available to advertisers about search patterns and demographics."

The Yahoo! Blog posting about Yahoo! Clues offers a video and the Yahoo! Clues site is here.

Yahoo! Search previews new features

The Yahoo! Search Blog offered a preview of some new features coming in the fall 02010. According to the blog,

With more searches than ever for information-rich topics like music, movies, and news, we’ll be launching new, more visually compelling search results that let you discover information and be entertained all on one search result page.