AltaVista |
: Alta Vista (with a space) redirects here. For other uses see Alta Vista (disambiguation)
The name AltaVista refers both to an Internet search engine company and to that company s search engine product.
The engine, whose name means a view from above or high view , originated in 1995 with scientists at Digital Equipment Corporation s Research lab in Palo Alto, California, and was intended to showcase the speed of the company s DEC Alpha servers. It was for that reason originally launched at altavista.digital.com .
They devised a method to store every word of every HTML Webpage on the Internet in a fast, searchable index. This led to AltaVista s development of the first searchable, full-text Database of a large part of the World Wide Web.
The company s product Babel Fish (website) offered the Web s first Internet machine translation service that could translate words, phrases or entire Web sites to and from English language, Spanish language, French language, German language, Portuguese language, Italian language and Russian language. Babelfish is still one of the most popular free translation tools online.
s in many countries.
AltaVista pioneered a number of common search features, such as searching for phrases using indexed URIs.
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 a staggering US$3.3 million for the domain name altavista.com , 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 Yahoo! Search Marketing The failed attempt at a portal was dropped and the website was again revamped to provide simple search functions. In March 2004, Overture itself was taken over by Yahoo!. Shortly after Yahoo! s acquisition, the AltaVista site started using the Yahoo! Search database.
AltaVista was also one of the numerous websites which promised free Electronic mail for life , only to subsequently reverse this policy by charging a subscription fee for its email services.
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=See also=
*List of search engines|
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