On This Day in Tech History

On December 15th, 2011, Google announced that it would be shutting down its social networking service, Google Buzz, and replacing it with a new platform called Google+. This move was part of a broader effort by Google to compete with other popular social media sites like Facebook and Twitter. Google Buzz was launched in 2010 as a way for users to share updates, photos, and other content with their friends and followers. However, the service was criticized for its lack of privacy controls and for automatically adding users to public "Buzz" streams without their permission. These issues, combined with low user adoption, ultimately led to the demise of Google Buzz. Google+ was designed to address many of the shortcomings of Google Buzz and to provide a more robust and user-friendly social networking experience. The platform included several innovative features such as "Circles," which allowed users to organize their contacts into different groups, and "Hangouts," which enabled video chat with up to 10 people at once.

December 15th, 1995, marked the launch of AltaVista, one of the earliest search engines on the internet. AltaVista was developed by Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) and quickly gained popularity for its advanced search capabilities and large index of web pages. Prior to the launch of AltaVista, search engines were relatively primitive and often returned irrelevant or incomplete results. AltaVista changed all that by introducing several new features, including advanced text-based searching, natural language queries, and the ability to search for multimedia content such as images and audio files.