You know, back when AltaVista was a big deal for DEC, I figured it was going to kill Yahoo, since Yahoo only had a directory and AV had full-text indexes of huge numbers of pages. Sure, AV hasn’t kept its former glory, but it’s still a damned good search engine and now Yahoo owns it, along with FAST. Say what you will about how giant, all-encompassing portals are a bad move, but Yahoo’s the one who’s still big enough to pull off a purchase of Overture, which is still ranked above Google’s estimated value on the public markets. Amazing what half a decade’s change can do.

And AltaVista? Used to be part of Digital, which was sold to Compaq, which merged with HP. And the Yahoo homepage has a nice little "Powered by HP" link. So it all comes full circle.