alt.hn

6/8/2026 at 4:02:10 PM

Old'aVista – The most powerful guide to the old Internet

 https://oldavista.com/

by abnercoimbre

6/9/2026 at 4:58:27 AM

Perhaps I am imagining it, but I immediately thought it was a pun on AltaVista in that "alt" in German means old. But there is nothing on the site that seems to suggest that that was how the name came about. (Though in that sense, you can argue the original AltaVista already meant "Old'aVista".) The only clue is this line from the FAQ:

> The name of the website itself is a wordplay on Altavista.

Though, the creator mentions on his own page, that he is a German citizen (due to his grandfather), even though he speaks no German and have never lived there[1]; which could mean that pun is intentional. Not that it is really all that important (like not at all), but I can't help but wonder now...

[1] https://www.ericexperiment.com/about-me

by Svip

6/9/2026 at 6:40:58 AM

What evidence would it take to convince you that the name of the website itself is a wordplay on Altavista?

by jstanley

6/9/2026 at 2:36:12 PM

Unfortunately, I cannot edit my original post anymore, but it seems a few replies misunderstood my comment; in short: I wasn't questioning whether it is a wordplay (it clearly is), I was questioning which wordplay. Is it Old'aVista just because it kind of sounds like AltaVista, or is it Old'aVista because "alt" in German means old?

by Svip

6/9/2026 at 5:50:20 PM

I'm glad you made the comment because at the very least I learned a new German word (native English speaker and conversational in Spanish).

It's ironic to search for "alt meaning" and find a tertiary definition of "Pitched in the first octave above the treble staff; high" which would suggest more of the Spanish "alta" root rather than the Germanic root.

Now I'm curious how much origins are shared between Spanish and German.

Perhaps we can all agree English is a goofy language!

by dieselgate

6/9/2026 at 6:15:04 PM

The modern Germanic "alt" has some interesting leftovers in English from before English migrated its pronunciation/spelling towards "old". The word "auld" for instance (as in the holiday classic "Auld Lang Syne"). The beer term "ale" comes from "altbier" ("old beer") as in the "oldest known style of beer". (Lager yeasts were a later find. Also, if you are curious "lager" comes from "lagern" which mostly means "to cool/chill", with that being the benefit of lager yeasts that they are live and productive at colder temperatures.)

Both of which also suggest to me other ways to try to have made the wordplay in Old'aVista even cleaner if it was an intentional multilingual wordplay. "Ale-a-Vista" might have been silly or "AuldaVista" might have been funnier.

by WorldMaker

6/9/2026 at 12:45:02 PM

Well, if it looks like AltaVista, loads like AltaVista and is just as quack-less as AltaVista it probably is a pun on AltaVista.

by Mallory_Ringess

6/9/2026 at 6:17:09 AM

...given the line you quoted from the FAQ, I'm a bit confused about why you are still wondering. That seems about as straight forward of an answer to your question as one could expect.

by MostlyStable

6/9/2026 at 7:45:06 AM

It is clearly a word play, but I guess their question is whether or not the old = alt connection was made or not.

(Of course the alta in Altavista is from Spanish "high", but that doesn't really change anything)

by vidarh

6/9/2026 at 9:03:06 AM

The rhyming is good, making "Oldavista" a generic wordplay that is merely more obvious to find for German speakers, and the name is insignificant compared to the effort of reproducing the whole Altavista page.

by HelloNurse

6/9/2026 at 6:45:10 AM

>I'm a bit confused about why you are still wondering

They did admit to being German.

by walletdrainer

6/9/2026 at 3:16:20 PM

Alt=old in German, but Alta=high in Spanish. And vista is pretty much a Spanish word. A high observation point is a pretty good metaphor for a search engine.

by xhkkffbf

6/9/2026 at 6:57:11 AM

And here I thought it was going to be something to do with, at least in my experience, the much more memorable site: Astalavista. I will say, the linked site is nice for nostalgia and arguably more pleasant than being advertised donkey shows.

Sites like this remind me the internet used to be fun, and it was glorious. Really, makes me want to bust out Frontpage 2000 and Macromedia Fireworks to build a sweet landing page for an anime fan site and setup some phpBB forums.

by rubyn00bie

6/9/2026 at 6:20:13 PM

Astalavista was named in jest after the original AltaVista, it just survived a bit longer after AltaVista lost the search wars to the newcomers like Infoseek and Ask Jeeves who in turn eventually lost to newcomers like Google. How much you remember AltaVista probably says a lot about when the first time you used the internet was and maybe if you were a Yahoo or AltaVista fan at the time. (In those days Yahoo had the better human curated hierarchical directory and AltaVista had the better search index with more boolean and exact search operators supported.)

by WorldMaker

6/9/2026 at 7:31:54 AM

.com or .box.sk?

by ozozozd

6/9/2026 at 1:07:40 PM

[dead]

by taintlord22

6/9/2026 at 9:29:57 AM

I've been around the 'net long enough to remember when Altavista didn't even have it's own domain name, it was altavista.digital.com, this triggered some great memories of my first year or two using the web on the only computer in school with access to it.

by tonylucas

6/9/2026 at 10:20:11 AM

It seemed to take them a really long time to get rid of the digital part, probably because marketing thought it was good thing. At least it didn't require you to prepend www.

by KevinMS

6/9/2026 at 6:46:21 AM

The transparent pixel is often missing and breaks tables. HTML tags must be written properly in CAPS `<FONT>`, not `<font>`.

It doesn't work properly in my Netscape Navigator.

by reconnecting

6/9/2026 at 5:00:53 AM

That's very cool. But I really need to know how many people have visited the site as well as how long a page will take to download on a 56k modem.

by mattoxic

6/9/2026 at 10:14:28 PM

Remember when you'd be looking at a daily news article, and any hyperlinks to audio clips would have byte sizes and download time estimations in parentheses, just to help you decide if it was worth a click?

by Terr_

6/9/2026 at 5:52:31 AM

Chrome Dev tools can help you there

by NamlchakKhandro

6/8/2026 at 7:05:28 PM

The nostalgia welled up within me from depths I didn’t know I possessed.

by qubex

6/9/2026 at 7:12:39 AM

But is it running on those incredible 64-bit Alpha servers?

by rbanffy

6/9/2026 at 7:17:15 AM

at the rate it's loading (not), probably.

by sourcecodeplz

6/9/2026 at 8:04:42 AM

They must be running Windows NT. Wait for the Tru64 port. Or Ultrix, or VMS.

by rbanffy

6/9/2026 at 7:58:38 AM

do you have more information about it? thats sounds interesting

by pelasaco

6/9/2026 at 10:43:15 AM

The politics forum discussing the future of America dated 1998 is insanely depressing. That is optimism that disappeared forever.

by Fizz43

6/9/2026 at 11:40:38 AM

Optimism in general has gone down the drain, and understandably so.

by DaanDL

6/9/2026 at 1:56:07 PM

AV was something your uncle used - the OGs searched on Northern Light.

by thm

6/9/2026 at 3:34:24 PM

1337 h4xx0rz used hastalavista for warez.

by boobsbr

6/9/2026 at 5:35:35 AM

Seems they've done a good job of mimicking the old timey dial up connection speed as well.

by kristianc

6/9/2026 at 7:13:55 AM

Sadly, DEC Alphaservers are not easy to come by. They had to make it work on Intel ones.

by rbanffy

6/9/2026 at 2:42:09 PM

I was an internal beta tester for AltaVista while I was doing a co-op at DEC in 1995. Good times.

by mosburger

6/9/2026 at 6:54:43 AM

I was hoping it was an index of pages with last-modified http headers prior to a certain date.

by kristopolous

6/9/2026 at 10:33:16 AM

Did anyone ever use directories? I remember the search engine. Yahoo had the same.

It always felt a long winded way to find stuff or was that the "sponsored content" we get now?

by doublerabbit

6/9/2026 at 2:55:41 PM

Absolutely. Yahoo started out as directories, long before it added a search engine. They were a much better way to discover new corners of the internet (sorta like looking at a list of subreddits today). Web rings was another one. Internet was new, so it was always fun to surprise yourself with something different. Search engines were crap and would normally be used to look for something specific rather than discovery, which I guess hasn't changed.

by romanhn

6/9/2026 at 6:47:47 PM

Yahoo was originally "Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle", and earlier "Jerry and David's Guide to the World Wide Web". A key position at the company was a librarian who help establish and slot links into that hierarchy, and some early press addressed this and the obvious future role of library science in online content management. Don't believe all forward-looking speculation you read. (Or backward-looking reminiscences, for that matter.)

DMOZ was another such classification, originally launched by Mozilla and run for a time by AOL, though it closed in 2017, discussed on HN at the time <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13762362> and <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13759032>.

These were both useful and limited. Useful because early Web content-based search sucked. Altavista was the best of the bunch to my recollection, and only launched in late 1995. Google came along in (late?) 1997 and blew everyone away, I was using it by 1999. There were "sponsored content" directories, but those tended not to gain much traction as they were so obviously inferior in quality. The main directories generally avoided this taint.

The Web was far smaller, far less commercial, much less dynamic (editable / user-contributable sites were extremely rare, blogs barely existed), and pretty eclectic. Organising by category pretty much worked, as content evolved slowly, the total space was relatively small, and highlighting the Really Good Stuff was both useful and tractable. Today that's fairly intractable, though directory-like organisation might be seen in, say Wikipedia or some similar projects.

<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DMOZ>

There are still several online directories, some general, many specialised:

<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_web_directories>

by dredmorbius

6/9/2026 at 7:23:26 AM

[flagged]

by AashmanShukla

6/9/2026 at 5:55:40 AM

[flagged]

by rahulshah2002