ĪltaVista was the most favored search engine used by professional researchers at the "Internet Search-Off" study in February 1998, with 45 percent of the researchers choosing it. It was the 11th most visited Web site in 1998 and in 2000. The AltaVista site became one of the top destinations on the Web, and in 1997 it earned US$50 million in sponsorship revenue. The ability to search the Web, and AltaVista's service in particular, became the subject of numerous articles and even some books. Traffic increased steadily from 300,000 hits on the first day to more than 80 million hits per day two years later. It also allowed the user to limit search results from a domain, reducing the likelihood of multiple results from the same source.ĪltaVista's site was an immediate success. Another distinguishing feature of AltaVista was its minimalistic interface, which was lost when it became a Web portal, but regained when it refocused its efforts on its search function.
Together, the back-end machines had 130 GB of RAM and 500 GB of hard disk drive space, and received 13 million queries every day. Īs of 1998, it used 20 multi-processor machines using DEC's 64-bit Alpha processor. The Altavista home page in 1996, showing the simple search interfaceĪltaVista was the first searchable, full-text database on the World Wide Web with a simple interface. Īt launch, the service had two innovations that put it ahead of other search engines available at the time: It used a fast, multi-threaded crawler (Scooter) that could cover many more Web pages than were believed to exist at the time, and it had an efficient back-end search, running on advanced hardware. Lang was the founding CEO of AltaVista after being recruited by Digital Equipment Corporation to build its software business. AltaVista publicly launched as an Internet search engine on December 15, 1995. The name "AltaVista" was chosen in relation to the surroundings of their company at Palo Alto, California. Paul Flaherty came up with the original idea, along with Louis Monier and Michael Burrows, who wrote the Web crawler and indexer, respectively. Origins ĪltaVista was created by researchers at Digital Equipment Corporation's Network Systems Laboratory and Western Research Laboratory who were trying to provide services to make finding files on the public network easier. The word "AltaVista" is formed from the words for "high view" or "upper view" in Spanish (alta + vista) thus, it colloquially translates to "overview". On July 8, 2013, the service was shut down by Yahoo!, and since then the domain has redirected to Yahoo!'s own search site.
It became one of the most-used early search engines, but lost ground to Google and was purchased by Yahoo! in 2003, which retained the brand, but based all AltaVista searches on its own search engine. Lang, Paul Flaherty, Louis Monier, Michael Burrows, Jeffrey BlackĪltaVista was a Web search engine established in 1995.
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