[dangrossman]

Yahoo! bought Overture (which owned AltaVista) way back in 2003. They only replaced the search results with Yahoo!'s a year ago after announcing the site would be shut down. Seemed like they were using it as an occasional test bed in the meantime.

[simonw]

Yup, when I worked at Yahoo back in 2006 I remember altavista being described as a useful site for running experiments.