AltaVista
- "Alta Vista" (with a space) redirects here. For other uses see Alta Vista (disambiguation)
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The name AltaVista refers both to an Internet search engine company and to that company's search engine product.
Birth
AltaVista was started by Digital Equipment Corporation employee volunteers who were trying to provide services to make finding files on the public network easier.[citation needed] AltaVista was launched public as an internet search engine on 15 December, 1995 at http://altavista.digital.com.[1][2] AltaVista was misunderstood by its parent company. Digital Equipment Corporation, a hardware company, missed the potential of the Internet and instead rationalized that AltaVista would be a showcase for its new line of servers.
At launch the service had two innovations that set it ahead of the other search engines. It used a fast multi-threaded crawler (Scooter) that could cover a lot more Web pages than were believed to exist, and an efficient search back-end running on advanced hardware; as of 1998, 20 multi-processor machines using DEC's then-new Alpha processor, along with 130GB RAM and 500GB hard disk space each, receiving 13 million queries per day.[3] These made AltaVista the first searchable, full-text database of a large part of the World Wide Web.
Business Transactions
In 1996, AltaVista became the exclusive provider of search results for Yahoo!. In 1998, Digital was sold to Compaq, and in 1999 Compaq relaunched AltaVista as a web portal, abandoning their streamlined searchpage and alienating their core userbase. In June of the same year, Compaq paid AltaVista Technology Incorporated ("ATI") US$ 3.3 million for the domain name altavista.com (Jack Marshall, cofounder of ATI, had registered the name in 1994,) but it continued to lose marketshare, especially to Google. It was subsequently floated from Compaq as an independent company.
In February 2003, AltaVista was bought by Overture Services, Inc. The failed attempt at a "portal" was dropped and the website was again revamped to provide simple search functions. In October 2003, Overture itself was taken over by Yahoo!. In Aug. 2004, shortly after Yahoo!'s acquisition, the AltaVista site started using the Yahoo! Search database.
Free services
AltaVista was also one of the numerous websites which promised "free email for life", only to subsequently reverse this policy by charging a subscription fee for its email services.
In 2001 it announced it would launch an ISP in the UK with no phone call charges and only a £10 a year subscription fee. However the service never launched.
AltaVista provides free translation, branded Babel Fish, which translates text between several world languages.
External links
References
- ^ Lewis, Peter H. (1995-12-18), "Digital Equipment Offers Web Browsers Its 'Super Spider'", The New York Times, pp. Late Edition - Final, Section D, Page 4, Column 3
{{citation}}: Check date values in:|date=(help) - ^
Digital Press and Analysts News (1995-12-15). "Digital Develops Internet's First 'Super Spider'". Newsgroup: biz.digital.announce. [email protected].
{{cite newsgroup}}:|access-date=requires|url=(help); Check date values in:|date=(help) - ^ Ricardo Baeza-Yates and Berthier Ribeiro-Neto (1999). Modern Information Retrieval. Addison-Wesley/ACM Press, pp. 374, 390.