AltaVista is out to prove that troubled Internet companies can have second acts.
In a bid to recapture its former status as the Web's top-ranked search engine, the Palo Alto, California, company rolled out a dramatic overhaul of its site and indexing methodology this week.
Executives said the revamped site, which includes a pared-down front page and more frequent updates of indexed links, is part of a broader effort to restructure the company.
"The company tried to become a portal too late in the game, and lost focus," said Jim Barnett, AltaVista's CEO. "What we've done over the past year is focus the company back on our core strength and our roots, which is search."
The redesign comes amid a difficult period for AltaVista, a company that SearchDay editor Chris Sherman said "was once considered the king of search engines."
While the company enjoyed a brief spell of Internet stardom in the late 1990s, its fortunes abruptly reversed when the dot-com bubble burst. Over the past two years, AltaVista has weathered multiple rounds of layoffs and withdrew a stock offering once expected to net $300 million.
Meanwhile, the company's popularity among search engine users is also slipping. Although AltaVista still has a large following, with an estimated 33 million visitors a month worldwide, it trails behind rivals Google and Yahoo.
In the November ranking of most-visited U.S.-run Internet sites, tabulated by NetRatings, AltaVista did not make the top 25.
Still, search engine experts say it's not too late for AltaVista to make a comeback.
"They've had a history of making changes and hyping the changes and not really living up to the hype," Sherman said. "But this time it feels different. I get the impression they really are serious about getting back to being a serious player in the search industry."
Sherman said that while he's only done a few searches on the new AltaVista, he's getting better results than he used to. AltaVista now does a better job separating paid listings from genuinely relevant search results, he added.
AltaVista's Barnett believes the revamped site will help bring back many of the search engine's former fans.
In addition to a feature that refreshes more than half of its search results daily, the company is offering an established advanced search tool, Prisma, in four additional languages: French, German, Italian and Spanish.
AltaVista also claims to have vastly improved its ability to weed out duplicate pages, spam and dead links.
But Shari Thurow, marketing director at Grantastic Designs and author of the upcoming book Search Engine Visibility, isn't so sure.
"The look and feel is a million times better," Thurow said. "But I'm hoping their search results are more relevant, too, because the look and feel doesn't change that."
Like many early Web junkies, Thurow was an avid user of AltaVista. She claims that back in 1997 it was her favorite site.
Nowadays, Thurow says she usually prefers to conduct searches on Google, Fast and AskJeeves. She still uses AltaVista, but largely for software-related research and to find images, for which the site has a dedicated search function.
