====== AltaVista ======



In a time where [[Google]] is pre-eminent in the search business it is difficult to conceive how it was otherwise. Once upon a time AltaVista was the 800 lbs gorilla in the search engine jungle. AltaVista was originally conceived to showcase Digital Equipment Corporation's technology. In the spring of 1995 DEC launched the Alpha 8400, a high performance database server. The AltaVista [[robots|spider]] first started indexing the Web on the 4th of July, 1995. A team lead by Dr Louis Monier unveiled AltaVista on the 15th of December 1995. This search engine used several hundred robots running in parallel to index a much larger portion of the Web than predecessors. The system was also fast. Monier's team had growth in mind. The system could be expanded to cope with increasing popularity. More than 300,000 people used the AltaVista on the first day and within 12 months the system was handling 19 million requests per day. For the unsophisticated Web of the mid-1990s it also delivered pretty good results based largely on on-page factors, especially for those searchers who mastered the advanced query interface. AltaVista added more services, in particular Babelfish. Named after a creature in the book The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, the Babelfish could automatically translate Web pages into a myriad of languages.



AltaVista's subsequent decline, caused by a mixture of ambition and hubris, should serve as a lesson for anyone who bases their business around the results delivered by a single search engine.



At the start of 1998 Compaq, who'd grown from a maker of luggable IBM PC clones to the world's largest personal computer manufacturer, swallowed the once mighty DEC. It was the 2nd wave of the dot.com boom. Compaq spun out AltaVista with the idea of an Initial Public Offering (IPO). Other search engines such as Yahoo! and Excite had already gone down the same road and had brought their founders and investors vast wealth. However the window of IPO opportunity was fast closing.



By 1999 Search Engines were viewed as being passé. Portals were all the rage. A portal would act as a focus for a surfer's activity on the Web and would provide the owner multiple channels to market products. AltaVista recast itself as a portal and even started to offer Internet access. In the United Kindom it went as far as to announce unmetered access. This at a time when AOL, the biggest online provider, charged by the hour. Unfortunately for AltaVista the telecommunications market wasn't ready. The botched announcement cost the UK boss, Andy Mitchell his job and damaged AltaVista's reputation.



The move to a portal also detracted from the core search business. Users had to cut through the cruft to get to search then found the results cluttered with [[sponsored links]]. It then emerged that, with the notable exception of paid inclusion, the index hadn't been updated in months. By the end of 1999 MSN Search dropped AltaVista as its  provider. With stale content and untrustworthy results users began to desert in droves to the simple, search focussed interface of new kid: Google. In February 2003 Overture acquired AltaVista for $140 million, a fraction of its $2.3 billion valuation at the height of the dot.com boom. Although they'd survived the dot.bomb this lead some wags to dub the search engine: AltaBusta.



AltaVista holds a number of search related US patents including methods for identifying duplicate content in indexes (5,970,497 and 6,138,113) and a method for spidering and indexing the Web (6,021,409)