AltaVista

Origins and Popularity of AltaVista - AltaVista was created by researchers at Digital Equipment Corporations Network Systems Laboratory and Western Research Laboratory. - The original idea was conceived by Paul Flaherty. - Louis Monier and Michael Burrows wrote the Web crawler and indexer, respectively. - The name AltaVista was chosen in relation to the surroundings of their company at Palo Alto, California. - AltaVista publicly launched as an Internet search engine on December 15, 1995. - AltaVista was the first searchable, full-text database on the World Wide Web with a simple interface. - It used a fast, multi-threaded crawler (Scooter) and had an efficient back-end search. - AltaVista's site became one of the top destinations on the Web. - In 1997, it earned US$50 million in sponsorship revenue. - AltaVista was the most favored search engine used by professional researchers in February 1998. Business Transactions of AltaVista - In 1996, AltaVista became the exclusive provider of search results for Yahoo!. - In 1999, Compaq redesigned AltaVista as a Web portal. - AltaVista gradually shed its portal features and refocused on search. - In February 2003, AltaVista was bought by Overture Services, Inc. for $140 million. - In July 2003, Overture was taken over by Yahoo!. Free Services offered by AltaVista - AltaVista provided Babel Fish, a Web-based machine translation application. - It also provided a free email service with 200,000 active registered email accounts. - Babel Fish was superseded by Yahoo! Babel Fish and now redirects to Bing's translation service. - The email service shut down in March 2002, with domestic US accounts closed and others sold to Mail.com. - AltaVista implemented the first practical CAPTCHA schemes to fight against malicious internet bots. Acquisition and Decline of AltaVista - AltaVista was acquired by CMGI in 1999. - It canceled its proposed IPO in 2001. - AltaVista underwent a makeover in 2002. - Overture Services acquired AltaVista in 2003. - Yahoo! acquired Overture Services, including AltaVista. Demise and Legacy of AltaVista - AltaVista's popularity declined with the rise of Google. - Yahoo! announced the closure of AltaVista in 2013. - AltaVista was shut down on July 8, 2013. - AltaVista's closure marked the end of an era in search engines. - AltaVista paved the way for modern search engines. - Its advanced search features influenced future search engines. - AltaVista's Babel Fish translation service inspired other translation tools. - The demise of AltaVista highlighted the competitive nature of the search engine industry. - AltaVista remains a nostalgic memory for early internet users.