Remembering raging.com

This has been bugging me for a minute. I remembered a site, 'raging.com,' that was a de-bloated AltaVista service, that took a page from the early Google playbook and offered fast, powerful, text-only searching. Trying to find it circa the 1990s via archive.org found captures of Raging Bull (“Leading the Investor Revolution”), located at www.raging.com, through at least May 11, 2000. And since I also remember visiting that site a lot during those heady dot-com bubble days, I was convinced I was mis-remembering the name of the AltaVista search offering.

But, nope, my memory is (at least in this respect) intact, and it wasn’t a fever dream, confirmed when I found this Slashdot comment. As early as May 19, 2000, raging.com brought you to raging search from altavista:

raging.com search engine home page

By August 15, 2000, it was a redirect to ragingsearch.altavista.com, but still branded “raging.” Looks like that survived until at least early 2005, but by February 5th of that year it just redirected to plain vanilla AltaVista. By at least as early as October 2005, raging.com was owned and parked by a domain name squatter. Given the turmoil the search engine was going through at the time, perhaps not surprising. By that point, though, AltaVista was toast, for a variety of reasons (article sauce):

AltaVista’s Demise

AltaVista’s relationship with Yahoo started in 1996, when it began to provide supplementary results for Yahoo’s search portal queries. From this point, AltaVista entered a turbulent phase that eventually resulted in it being acquired by its key rival.

The first big shift was Digital’s sale to Compaq in 1998. All of Digital’s hardware was rebranded with the Compaq name. Around this time, Compaq also paid somewhere between $2.3 million and $3.3 million for the domain altavista.com, depending on the source you believe. (The actual figure was a closely guarded secret.)
Christiaan Colen/ Flickr. CC BY 2.0

Compaq’s Internet Services division decided that it would try beat Yahoo at its own game by diversifying its features. It turned AltaVista into a more complex web portal, doing away with the simple search form that users had enjoyed before, and replacing it with an increasingly cluttered homepage.

This move away from AltaVista’s streamlined search experience made AltaVista more similar to its competitors. Users gradually began to switch to a newcomer, Google, for the simple search they missed.

In 1999, 83% of AltaVista was purchased by CMGI, owners of the Lycos search engine. It was valued at around $2.3 billion, and an IPO was on the cards. But by 2001, its IPO was canceled and staff were laid off as CMGI reportedly struggled to make AltaVista profitable.

Around this time, Google surpassed AltaVista’s popularity with users, processing more search queries than its rival for the first time. AltaVista began to backtrack on its portal layout experiment and return to a simple search form, but the damage was already done.

The ailing AltaVista brand was acquired again in February 2003 for just $140 million by Overture. Then, Yahoo acquired Overture four months later, which marked the beginning of the end for the AltaVista name. All of the search technology that had been built up under the AltaVista brand was absorbed into Yahoo search in 2011, just as its search results had been co-opted by Yahoo 15 years earlier.

Yahoo closed AltaVista quietly in 2013.

When I showed up at Johnston in the fall of 1995, trying to get a beige tower 486DX2/66 running Novell UnixWare 1.1N up and running, when my best web browser experience was Mosaic under X Window System on the console of that box (with a second-hand 14" CTX monitor and 256 colors), AltaVista was the shit. (I was a Mac user. Using lynx on VT220 terminals was a bit foreign to me, at the time...)

Anyway. At least I now know I wasn’t hallucinating. Unlike today’s AI tools.