History Search Engines - AltaVista

AltaVista – Born in 1995

 

AltaVista, meaning “a view from above,” developed out of research by scientists at Digital Equipment Corporation’s (DEC) Western Research Laboratory in Palo Alto, California during the spring of 1995. They were trying to showcase their computer database system called the Alpha 8400 TurboLaser that was faster than its competitors. Scientists developed a search tool to crawl, store and quickly index every word of all HTML web pages on the Internet. This new search tool was powerful. For example, in August 1995, it conducted its first full-scale crawl of the web bringing back about 10 million pages.

The two key scientists involved with AltaVista’s development were Louis Monier and Michael Burrows. Louis wrote the crawler (called Scooter) and Michael wrote the indexer. After testing the new search engine with 10,000 DEC employees, AltaVista opened to the public on December 15, 1995 at altavista.digital.com. Initially, the back-end processing machines received 13 million queries per day. With its release, AltaVista became the first searchable full-text database on the World Wide Web with a simple interface. Over 300,000 visitors used the search tool on the first day and had 19 million hits by the end of 1996, and 80 million per day at the end of 1997.
Ironically in 1996, AltaVista started exclusively providing search results for Yahoo! who would one day become AltaVista’s owner. Before this time, DEC was acquired by Compaq for $9.6 billion at the start of 1998. Despite success as a modest search interface, in 1999 Compaq released AltaVista as a web portal once again ironically hoping to compete with Yahoo! It may be reasoned that AltaVista’s portal strategy was a cause of its eventual decline as well as the rise of Google. By 2002, efforts returned to sharpening the quality of the simple search interface.
In June 1999, CMGI, an Internet investment company with 20% ownership in Lycos, agreed to acquire 83 percent of AltaVista. CMGI planned a public offering of AltaVista in April 2000, but cancelled the IPO as the Internet bubble collapsed.
Near the end of 2002, AltaVista became the first Internet search engine to offer image, audio, and video search as part of a new range of multimedia functionalities. Additionally, AltaVista gained innovative recognition for its release of Babel Fish, the web’s first-ever multi-lingual Internet search. Babel Fish could translate words, phrases, or entire website to and from English, Spanish, French, German, Portuguese, Italian, and Russian. With its advanced multimedia search capabilities and language translation and recognition services, AltaVista was likely the Internet’s most technologically advanced search tool at the time.
In February 2003, Overture purchased AltaVista for $140 million. This price was a fraction of AltaVista’s valuation of $2.3 billion three years earlier. Unfortunately, AltaVista’s likelihood to continue its innovative heritage with Overture Services, Inc. was quickly killed when Yahoo! purchased Overture at the end of 2003. With this purchase, AltaVista became Yahoo! using the same search index and user interface. In May 2008, AltaVista’s Babel Fish translation service was also branded under its parent company as Yahoo! Babel Fish.