So speaking of companies struggling for relevancy, Altavista has redesigned. I hesitate to call it that though, because it’s actually become uglier than I could have imagined. They have no excuse, and I shudder to think how much money that may have been spent on what is quite possible the most aesthetically unattractive “major” site I’ve seen. It’s like they’re trying to do simple, but fail badly. Warning: Altavista link NSWE.

Update: This article at Wired talks about the design, but I think it gives Altavista way too much credit for it’s current efforts. They used to be my favorite search engine too, but that doesn’t mean they were that good at it. They were simply the best there was at the time. I remember routinely going 8-10 pages into results to find what I needed. They tout a more frequently updated index as one of their improvements, but the fact of the matter that the index doesn’t really matter, it’s putting the “good stuff” on top, on the first page, which Google does very well. Don’t buy the hype.