Deja.com (dossier) - or Deja News, as it was called in olden times - used to be one of the most useful sites on the Web. Back when Usenet was more than spam postings, Deja News offered the most efficient way to pull precise information out of thousands of newsgroups via a single search box. People who visited the site saved a huge amount of time; I would have paid for the service had I been asked.
I don't visit Deja.com much anymore, in part because it now has a drastically different business model, comparison shopping. The Usenet search is still there, but it's harder to get at and it doesn't seem to have much to do with the rest of the site.
Also useful was Digital Equipment Corp.'s AltaVista (dossier), one of the early search engines. Dubbed "the fire hose" by its fans because it seemed to have indexed the whole Web (an impressive achievement, even back in 1997), it was a swift, deep search site. Now, two owners later - DEC became part of Compaq, which did silly things like pay $3 million for a domain name the original owners had forgotten to register, and then flipped it to CMGI (CMGI) - I visit the site less and less, in part because I have no idea what AltaVista is anymore. Several months ago, the management appeared to think that links to the company's perplexing TV commercials were what their customers wanted on the site's front page. Perhaps the idea was to repurpose the company's $120 million advertising campaign as content.
Unlike Yahoo (YHOO), which has assiduously stuck to its original and successful look and feel as it has expanded in all directions, AltaVista has grafted new services onto its site and occasionally removed them (like the abandoned Discovery hard-disk-search program). For every smart deal like the purchase of fellow CMGI property Raging Bull (dossier) late last year, which kick- started a community initiative, there have been missteps like the high-profile October 1999 relaunch of the site as, well, it wasn't clear. "Yahoo is like an amusement park - fun, functional and fast," AltaVista CEO Rod Schrock told The Standard at the time. "AltaVista is like the Epcot Center - dynamic, thought-provoking." Today, the front page of the dynamic, thought-provoking site offers links to photo galleries of Pamela Anderson and Minnie Driver. Also available are headlines featuring yesterday's news.
And what has become of the company's original strength as a search engine? You now have three search options on the front page - Power Search, Advanced Search, Raging Search - with no explanation of how they differ. It turns out that a Power Search is a standard one, an Advanced Search lets you use Boolean queries, and a Raging Search is, depending on your level of cynicism, either a return to the original uncluttered AltaVista or an attempt to copy Google (dossier), which has far more buzz these days. I was delighted to see that the no-frills look was back and I searched for my own name. The top choice was a German-language listing for an out-of-print book I wrote 10 years ago. That's the problem with some hoses: You never know what's going to spray out first.
AltaVista still has much opportunity: Last month's Media Metrix (JMXI) report finds it resting comfortably in the Top 10 of Web traffic. A third attempt to go public (twice, under different owners, AltaVista withdrew an S-1 registration statement) may be coming; CMGI chairman David Wetherell calls the first quarter of next year "optimal timing" for an IPO. As dubious a proposition as that may be, there's one small reason to take heart. While CMGI's marketing materials still call AltaVista "the premier media and commerce Internet Network," whatever that means, the press release for CMGI's recent quarterly results had no problem referring to AltaVista as a "search engine." Perhaps,
