In 2000, AltaVista had more than twice Google's share of web searchers
AltaVista launched in December 1995 as the first full-text searchable index of the web, and by 1997 it was handling over 80 million hits a day. As late as 2000 it served 17.7 percent of internet users against Google's 7 percent. Three years later it sold for $140 million.
The search engine began as a hardware demo. Researchers at Digital Equipment Corporation wanted to show off the company's machines, and Paul Flaherty proposed the idea, with Louis Monier programming the crawler and Michael Burrows writing the indexer. The name, Spanish for high view, nodded to their Palo Alto surroundings. Its edge came from Scooter, a fast multi-threaded crawler that covered far more pages than people then thought the web contained, and an efficient database running on DEC hardware. Traffic rose from 300,000 hits on its first day in December 1995 to more than 80 million daily by 1997.
Innovations piled up. AltaVista is credited with the first CAPTCHA, built to stop bots from registering fraudulent accounts and stuffing its index. In 1996 it became Yahoo's exclusive search supplier, and in 1997 it launched Babel Fish, a web translator. When Compaq bought DEC in January 1998 for $9.6 billion, AltaVista came along, and Compaq paid $3.3 million for the altavista.com domain to replace the clumsy altavista.digital.com.
Then came the portal era. From 1999 its simple yellow-and-orange search page was rebuilt to compete with Yahoo, adding news, finance, shopping, traffic cameras, free webmail and even free dial-up internet. Staff grew from 80 to over 600, and a $120 million marketing push included a television advertisement featuring Pamela Anderson. Compaq sold 83 percent of the company to CMGI in June 1999 for $2.1 billion in stock plus $220 million in cash, but a planned $300 million stock market listing was cancelled when the dot-com bubble burst.
Decline followed quickly as Google won users over. Overture Services bought AltaVista for $140 million in February 2003, Yahoo bought Overture that July, and in June 2013 the AltaVista address was quietly redirected to Yahoo Search.
Source: AltaVista
