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Did you know about AltaVista?
| Date Added: May 31, 2008 01:11:42 AM |
| Author: |
| Category: Internet and Online |
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Researchers at Digital Equipment Corporation's Western Research Laboratory created the Alta Vista search platform while pursuing an easier way to find files stored on networks. Louis Monier and Michael Burrows are the two people who are most responsible for the search engine. Monier wrote the web crawler bot, while Burrows wrote the indexer, which saved the files for future use. AltaVista was picked for the official name because of the companies location: Palo Alto. AltaVista was publicly launched as an internet search engine on December 15th 1995.
Alta Vista was ahead of the game at it’s launch – it had two main technologies that pushed it above and beyond the other available engines. It used a fast crawler (known as Scooter) which was capable of visiting a lot more Web pages than had been thought to exist. The efficient back end software also set it ahead, allowing those who actually used the search capabilities to find what they were looking for faster. This meant that AltaVista was the first searchable, full-text database of a majority portion of the internet. AltaVista's search engine was met with great success. The newfound ability to search for specific items on the web, and AltaVista's specialty service in particular, became the subject of many online discourses. AltaVista itself became one of the top websites on the internet, and would earn over $100,000,000 in sponsorship revenue.
In 1996, AltaVista became the exclusive provider of search results for Yahoo. In 1998, Yahoo sold AltaVista and it’s head company to Compaq. In 1999, Compaq revamped AltaVista as an interactive internet home page service, aiming to compete against Yahoo. Rod Schrock encouraged AltaVista to abandon its streamlined search page and focus on features like email provision and online interactive shopping. In June of 1998, Compaq compensated AltaVista Technology Incorporated ("ATI" – not to be confused with the “ATI” who produces computer graphics cards) $3.3 million for the domain name altavista.com – Jack Marshall, who was also cofounder of ATI, was the original registrar of the domain name in 1994.
In June 1999, Compaq liquidated it’s strong plurality in AltaVista to another company called CMGI. CMGI was an internet investment company who had planned to take over AltaVista. However, these plans were cancelled when the internet boom turned into the great domain name crash. Around this same time, Google sprang up. As time went on, AltaVista would continue to lose search ownership to Google, even after various improvements to their own search engine. AltaVista gradually reduced its Yahoo-like features and refocused on the search engine market.
In February of 2003, AltaVista was purchased by Overture, an internet advertising company. In October 2003, Overture itself was purchased and integrated into Yahoo. Today, AltaVista.com no longer uses the initial technologies developed by Monier and Burrows – because of the 2003 acquisition, AltaVista is actually the same search engine as Yahoo, just with a different name.
Up until May of 2008, AltaVista still had one thing that set it apart from Yahoo: the high quality translation service. However, in May of 2008, the name of the translation service was changed from AltaVista Babel Fish to Yahoo Babel Fish.
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