Altavista vs. Altavista

[Danny Sullivan]

> It appears that the folks at Altavista Technologies, which is
> indeed not affiliated with Digital, got tired of people asking how
> to search their site, so they put up that search line as a way of
> diverting search engine traffic to Digital, while allowing people
> to do their searches at the same time.  

Actually, the people at AltaVista Technologies discovered that many 
people trying to reach the AltaVista search service, 
http://www.altavista.digital.com/, instead entered their URL, 
http://www.altavista.com/.

They decided to take advantage of this traffic and put up a page that 
looked incredibly similar to the AltaVista search page. On this page, 
they sold ads.

Digital sued them, and the companies settled with the agreement that 
AltaVista Technologies would make clear that the services are not 
related. Thus, that big ugly text block that you see.

Additionally, you'll note that if you do a search from the 
AltaVista Technologies site, AltaVista (the Search Service) detects 
where you came from and puts a big notice tell you of your mistake.

Finally, if you should make a typo with some of the other major 
search engines, it's a sad but true fact that you'll usually come to 
a porn site taking advantage of the mistake.

cheers,
danny


-----------------------------------
Danny Sullivan 
Editor, Search Engine Watch
http://searchenginewatch.com