See, Yahoo several years ago, back in 2000, somewhere around that time frame bought out Overture Services (now rebranded as Yahoo Search Marketing). Prior to Yahoo buying out Overture Services, Overture itself bought out Alta Vista. Thus making Yahoo the new parent company of Alta Vista. Overture itself was a Pay-per-click search engine (PPC) holding exclusive patents on it's technology. When Yahoo acquired Overture, Yahoo was left to face the lawsuite filed from Overture Services against Google over the whole Google Adwords ordeal. Well for years, Yahoo has maintained Alta Vista and All The Web as seperate search engines. That's where Yahoo for the longest time got it search results from was from it's then newly owned Alta Vista. That's why Yahoo bought Overture in the first place was for Overture's Pay-per-click patented technology and for Alta Vista's search technology. This last year, instead of Yahoo updating Alta Vista's search index, they decided to lay-off people and then pay Bing for their search results. That's why at the bottom of Yahoo's search results page it says "Powered by Bing". The Alta Vista url should soon redirect to Yahoo Search homepage as www.alltheweb.com already does. It's Yahoo's way of cutting costs.

So you can't get rid of Yahoo as Yahoo will be cutting Alta Vista out of it's company's infrastructure. Rest in peace Alta Vista.

FACTS ABOUT ALTA VISTA: Alta Vista for the quite some time in the dawn of the search engine era (late 90's early 2000's) was a big player among Google. Alta Vista as search engine experts say, had some features that Google did not thus making it a toss-up at the time between Google and Alta Vista. After Yahoo got a hold of Alta Vista, Yahoo began discontinuing Alta Vista's special features such as babelfish. Alta-Vista created babel-fish and then Yahoo discontinued it only to start the service back up as Yahoo Babelfish.