AltaVista Northern Europe Looks Gone For Good

I still haven’t gotten a straight answer from AltaVista regarding the closure its former Northern European site -- and lots of people keep asking. Here's the official line so far from AltaVista:

"The change in the AltaVista Northern Europe site is reflective of AltaVista's shift away from licensing its search technology. Instead, AltaVista is focusing on building and leveraging the AltaVista global brand to provide users with the most satisfying and comprehensive Internet experience."

I'm interpreting this to mean that AltaVista isn't going to renew the mirror site arrangement with Telia, either because AltaVista has changed its strategy, or perhaps -- as AltaVista's support staff messaged one reader -- because Telia decided to no longer partner with AltaVista.

Perhaps it was even a mutual decision, but whatever the case, fans of that former site shouldn't get their hopes up that it will return.

The entire situation has been confusing, in that over the past month, AltaVista has continued to list the site as part of its search network. But then, anyone following the link and trying to do a search gets a message that the service has been discontinued and is directed back to the main site.

For example, Danish users are told that the site is no longer running, and "the reason is that AltaVista and Scandinavia Online are working together to make a new and better search engine. You will get both AltaVista's great global index, but also Kvasirs huge Danish catalog."

Swedes are being directed to another search engine, and a similar situation may be happening with other languages.

AltaVista Northern Europe
http://altavista.telia.com/

Kvasir
http://kvasir.dk/
http://kvasir.sol.no/
http://kvasir.se/

European Search Engines
http://searchenginewatch.com/facts/regional/europe.html