AltaVista
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| Type | Private company | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| Foundation date | 1995 | ||
| Headquarters | Palo Alto, California, USA | ||
| Key people | Paul Flaherty, Louis Monier, Michael Burrows, Jeffrey Black | ||
| Parent | Overture Services, Yahoo! | ||
| Website | AltaVista.com | ||
| Alexa rank |  9,723 (February 2013[update])[1] |
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| Type of site | Search engine | ||
| Advertising | Yes | ||
| Registration | No | ||
| Available in | Multilingual | ||
| Launched | December 15, 1995 | ||
| Current status | Active | ||
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AltaVista was a web search engine owned by Yahoo!. AltaVista was once one of the most popular search engines but lost its ground with the rise of Google. In May 2011, Yahoo! shut down the site.[2] As of 2012, the AltaVista website is up, and it is stated on the website that they are using the Yahoo! search engine. Searches as of May 2013 utilize Yahoo! Search BOSS APIs, but still uses AltaVista branding.
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Origins [edit]
AltaVista 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.[3] Paul Flaherty was responsible for the original idea,[4] [5] and two key participants were Louis Monier, who wrote the crawler, and Michael Burrows, who wrote the indexer. The name AltaVista was chosen in relation to the surroundings of their company at Palo Alto. AltaVista was publicly launched as an internet search engine on December 15, 1995 at altavista.digital.com.[6][7]
At launch, the service had two innovations which set it ahead of the other search engines: it used a fast, multi-threaded crawler (Scooter) which could cover many more Web pages than were believed to exist at the time and an efficient search running back-end on advanced hardware. As of 1998, it used 20 multi-processor machines using DEC's 64-bit Alpha processor. Together, the back-end machines had 130 GB of RAM and 500 GB of hard disk space, and received 13 million queries per day.[8] This made AltaVista the first searchable, full-text database of a large part of the World Wide Web. The distinguishing feature of AltaVista was its minimalistic interface compared with other search engines of the time; a feature which was lost when it became a portal, but was regained when it refocused its efforts on its search function.
AltaVista's site was an immediate success. Traffic increased steadily from 300,000 hits on the first day to more than 80 million hits a day two years later. The ability to search the web, and AltaVista's service in particular, became the subject of numerous articles and even some books.[3] AltaVista itself became one of the top destinations on the web, and by 1997 would earn US$50 million in sponsorship revenue.[9]
Business transactions [edit]
In 1996, AltaVista became the exclusive provider of search results for Yahoo!. In 1998, Digital was sold to Compaq and in 1999, Compaq redesigned AltaVista as a web portal, hoping to compete with Yahoo!. Under CEO Rod Schrock, AltaVista abandoned its streamlined search page and focused on features like shopping and free email.[10] In June 1998, Compaq paid AltaVista Technology Incorporated ("ATI") $3.3 million for the domain name altavista.com – Jack Marshall, cofounder of ATI, had registered the name in 1994.
In June 1999, Compaq sold a majority stake in AltaVista to CMGI, an internet investment company.[11] CMGI filed for an initial public offering for AltaVista to take place in April 2000, but as the internet bubble collapsed, the IPO was cancelled.[12] Meanwhile, it became clear that AltaVista's portal strategy was unsuccessful, and the search service began losing market share, especially to Google. After a series of layoffs and several management changes, AltaVista gradually shed its portal features and refocused on search. By 2002, AltaVista had improved the quality and freshness of its results and redesigned its user interface.[13]
In February 2003, AltaVista was bought by Overture Services, Inc.[14] In July 2003, Overture itself was taken over by Yahoo!.[15]
In December 2010, a Yahoo! employee leaked PowerPoint slides that the search engine would be shut down as part of a consolidation at Yahoo!.[16] In May 2011, the shutdown commenced, and all results are now returned on a Yahoo! page. As of October 2012, the search engine still used Yahoo's results with AltaVista branding. In November, however, searches were modified to utilize Yahoo! Search BOSS APIs and no longer use AltaVista branding.
Free services [edit]
AltaVista provided Babel Fish, a web-based machine translation application that translates text or web pages from one of several languages into another. It was later superseded by Yahoo! Babel Fish and now redirects to Bing's translation service.
See also [edit]
References [edit]
- ^ "Altavista.com Site Info". Alexa Internet. Retrieved 2013-02-02.
- ^ AMIR EFRATI (16). "Yahoo Plans to Shut Down Several Websites". Dow Jones & Company, Inc. Archived from the original on January 27 2011. Retrieved December 16, 2010.
- ^ a b Eric J. Ray, Deborah S. Ray, and Richard Selzer (1998), The AltaVista Search Revolution (2nd ed.) (2nd ed.), Osborne/McGraw-Hill
- ^ Andrew Alleman (June 1, 2011), "Viking Office Products Tries to Take Sentimental Domain Name from Altavista Inventor’s Widow", Domain Name Wire
- ^ Daniel B. Banks, Jr. (May 31, 2011), National Arbitration Forum Decision Claim Number: FA1104001383534
- ^ Lewis, Peter H. (December 18, 1995), "Digital Equipment Offers Web Browsers Its 'Super Spider'", The New York Times: Late Edition – Final, Section D, Page 4, Column 3, retrieved 2012-12-21
- ^ Digital Press and Analysts News (December 15, 1995). "Digital Develops Internet’s First ‘Super Spider’". biz.digital.announce. Retrieved February 26, 2007.
- ^ Ricardo Baeza-Yates and Berthier Ribeiro-Neto (1999). Modern Information Retrieval. Addison-Wesley/ACM Press, pp. 374, 390.
- ^ John Battelle (2005), The Search: How Google and Its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business and Transformed Our Culture, Portfolio
- ^ Kopytoff, Verne (March 27, 2000), "AltaVista Switches Web Portal Into High Gear", San Francisco Chronicle: C–1, retrieved 2012-12-21
- ^ Afzali, Cyrus (June 29, 1999), "CMGI Acquires 83 Percent of AltaVista for $2.3 Billion", internet.com
- ^ Barnes, Cecily (January 10, 2001), "AltaVista cancels proposed IPO", news.com, retrieved 2012-12-21
- ^ Glasner, Joanna (November 12, 2002), "AltaVista Makeover: A Better View", Wired
- ^ Hansell, Saul (February 19, 2003), "Overture Services to Buy AltaVista for $140 Million", The New York Times
- ^ "Yahoo to acquire Overture". July 13, 2003.
- ^ "RIP AltaVista, Yahoo Buzz, Delicious, MyBlogLog", silicontap.com, December 16, 2010
