Today, the name “Alta Vista search engine” isn’t that popular. You won’t even find the search engine’s name among the top 20 best or most popular search engines in the world.
Shockingly, Alta Vista was the Google of its era, the 1990s. In other words, it was as popular as the Google search engine then. It was the go-to search engine for people across the globe.
Today, it is obvious that Alta Vista’s reign has ended. But what really happened? How did the search engine lose its place?
In this post, we’ll discuss all you need to know about Alta Vista. Keep reading for more details.
What Is The AltaVista Search Engine?
When mentioning prominent search engines today, most people will never think of names like Alta Vista. Unfortunately, the search engine is no longer as popular as it was.
Alta Vista has a reputation as one of the longest-serving and leading search engines in the internet’s history. We are all familiar with Yahoo! ’s popularity in the 1990s. The search engine became a popular internet guide back then.
Alta Vista provided the directory of other sites and web pages. Unfortunately, Google came on board. The launching of Google in 1998 changed the game for the search engine. It was obvious that Google was too strong a competitor for Alta Vista.
So, the introduction of Google led to Alta Vista’s slow but painful decline. It became a shadow of itself.
Interestingly, Alta Vista has the biggest database on the web. It indexed over 140 million web pages. So, it’s one of the leading providers of search services and technology. The only major challenge is its commercial appeal.
Google is more commercially well-known than Alta Vista. It is even the standard for search engines.
Who Created Alta Vista Search Engine?
Digital Equipment Corporation created Alta Vista, one of the search engines that shaped internet exploration many decades ago.
You may wonder why Digital Equipment Corporation decided to invest its time and resources in creating a search engine like Alta Vista. What was their motive?
Well, the point is that Digital Equipment Corporation’s interest was to provide internet users with a service that makes it easier to find files on the public network.
The researchers behind this search engine did something remarkable. They were able to store every single word of all the HTML pages securely within the internet. They turned the stored HTML page into a fast and searchable index.
Whenever the name “Alta Vista” is mentioned, names like “Louis Monier” and “Michael Burrows” should appear alongside. Monier contributed to Alta Vista’s creation by writing the search engine’s crawler. On the other hand, Burrows wrote Alta Vista’s indexer.
When Was Alta Vista Founded?
Alta Vista came into existence in 1995. It was the most popular and widely used search engine in the 1990s before Google took over.
In 2003, Yahoo! bought the search engine and tried to revive it. But the company couldn’t return the search engine to its former glory. Google was too strong a competitor.
So, in 2013, Yahoo decided to shut down the search engine. It now redirects all its domains to its search site.
Innovations That Gave Alta Vista A Competitive Edge
Alta Vista has proven itself as a unique search engine. The developers created it to serve as a super fast and easy search engine to find information online, and it worked as designed.
This search engine boasts innovations that other search engines lack. It features a fast multithreaded crawler, also called “Scooter,” with the capacity to cover numerous web pages that were believed to be in existence during its reign.
Another innovation that placed Alta Vista ahead of its competitors was its back-end search. It has an efficient back-end search designed to run on highly advanced hardware.
The search engine’s advanced crawler made it capable of producing over 13 million queries in a single day. It was a huge and successful project for the developers.
Alta Vista’s success rate made it the first full-text database searchable throughout the web. So, it was a massive search engine at that time.
Traffic the search engine received also shows how massive the project was. On the first day the search engine was launched, it recorded 300,000 daily hits.
Alta Vista grew quickly within two years. Two years after its launch, it started recording over 80 million hits on a daily basis.
An increase in traffic meant that the revenue the platform was generating would increase, and it did. Sponsorship revenue grew massively, while the search engine became the go-to source for internet users seeking information.
Features That Make The Alta Vista A Unique Search Engine
This search engine boasts diverse features that set it apart. So, it wasn’t just the Google search engine of the 1990s.
Here are the features that set it apart.
- Advanced search features: Alta Vista is the first ever search engine that offers audio, image, and video search. These features are common in today’s search engines, but we have to give Alta Vista credit for being the first to make them available.
- The first multilingual search: Multilingual search is a popular feature in today’s search engines, but Alta Vista was the first search engine to make users enjoy such features. It offered the internet’s first multilingual search option.
A Handy Tip: Babel Fish, a web-based machine translation application, functioned on Alta Vista’s web page as a free translation service.
The tool’s job is to translate texts into different languages. It can automatically translate your texts (in any language) into a language of your choice. That was how it worked.
Another unique feature that sets Babel Fish apart is that it doesn’t just translate your phrases and sentences. It translates the entire website into diverse languages. That was how advanced and useful it was.
Alta Vista is available in about 25 different languages.
- User-friendly search engine: This search engine boasts an intuitive interface, and it’s a breeze to use. Its user-friendly nature is one of the reasons its usage spiked following its launch. This search engine allows searches to filter the search results to ensure users have access to relevant results based on the keyword or topic.
So Alta Vista doesn’t just offer translation, multimedia search, and other specialty searches. It ensures users get the most relevant results, making online search seamless.
Who Bought Alta Vista Search Engine?
Like many search engines, Alta Vista has had several business translations that have shaped the function and value of the search engine. Today, it has stopped functioning. But some events led to where it is today.
Alta Vista and Yahoo! ’s collaboration began in 1996. Then, Alta Vista became Yahoo! ’s search result provider.
In 1998, Compaq purchased Digital, giving it the keys to Alta Vista. After buying Digital, the company that owned Alta Vista, Compaq, thought it would make sense to redesign the search engine and went ahead with their plans.
Compaq decided to make Alta Vista become a web portal. They aimed to gain a competitive edge over Yahoo! Rod Schrock, the CEO managing the company, decided to create a new path for Alta Vista.
Schrock made the search engine leave its streamlined search page. Instead, the company started incorporating features like shopping and free email to the search engine.
In June 1998, Alta Vista Technology Incorporated received approximately $3.3 million from Compaq. The payment was for the domain name “Altavista.com.”
Compaq wanted to take control of the name, hoping that the move could give them some edge over Yahoo! Jack Marshall, one of Alta Vista’s co-founders, was the person who registered the domain name in 1994. So, the acquisition and transfer of ownership between both companies was a breeze.
CMGI approached Compaq for a majority stake in Alta Vista, which the company agreed to. The deal occurred in June 1999. CMGI is an internet investment firm, so the deal went ahead smoothly. It was obvious to people who knew about Alta Vista, and Compaq believed that the agreement was a great move on both sides.
CMGI didn’t waste time in making Alta Vista available for public trading. They filed for an IPO (initial public offering) for the search engine in 2000.
Was CMGI’s IPO successful? Unfortunately, it wasn’t. The expectations were high, but the outcome was shocking. Alta Vista’s fame slowly faded, leading to the IPO’s cancellation.
Alta Vista had a strong competitor, Google, which led to its downfall. Its web portal was unsuccessful, and Google’s emergence was to blame for it.
Alta Vista started losing its market share to Google. However, the people behind the search engine knew that they had to put up a serious fight to reclaim their position in the search engine market. They knew they had to do something extraordinary to compete with Google.
The search engine’s download spiral forced its owners’ hands to lay off most of its staff and management. After several managerial changes, Alta Vista started to look like a brand-new search engine. In 2002, the search engine’s interface was redesigned, and the quality of its search results improved massively. It started to look like a serious search engine again.
Alta Vista made a move to purchase Overture Services, Inc., in 2003. They eventually got the deal done with the company for $140 million. That same year, Yahoo! overtook Overture.
Following Yahoo! ’s purchase of Overture, Alta Vista, and Yahoo! Search started using the same search index.
In 2010, there were suggestions that Alta Vista’s owners were planning to shut down the search engine. A Yahoo! employee made the revelation, giving Alta Vista users a surprise.
Even though the search engine wasn’t as popular as Google or had a large market share as Google, it still had people who preferred to use it.
When the Yahoo! employee leaked the PowerPoint slides showing the world that the search engine’s time had ended, it shocked the world. But that was the end of Alta Vista.
On June 28, 2013, Yahoo! confirmed the news that Alta Vista was shutting down. On July 8, 2013, the search engine was shut down. If you visit Alta Vista’s homepage today, you’ll be redirected to Yahoo! ’s main page.
How Alta Vista Fought Malicious Internet Bots
Malicious internet bot attacks on search engines and websites started long ago, not today. It is a battle search engines have been facing since they came into existence.
The people running Alta Vista had to develop a means to combat the steady rise of malicious internet bot attacks. How? They implemented the first practical CAPTCHA schemes.
The steps Alta Vista owners took helped to protect the search engine. The CAPTCHA helped to prevent bots from creating new accounts and adding URLs to their web search engine.
Conclusion
The Alta Vista search engine was the “Google” in its era. It was created in 1995 and became a popular and widely used search engine.
Unfortunately, Google’s emergence caused the search engine’s market share to dwindle. Alta Vista lost its place to Google and became a shadow of itself.
Yahoo! purchased Alta Vista from its creators in 2003, but ten years later, the search engine was shut down. Yahoo! decided to shut down Alta Vista in 2013. Now, when you visit the search engine’s homepage, you’ll be redirected to Yahoo! ’s main page.
Alta Vista brought some remarkable features that made it unique. It was the first search engine to translate texts, phrases, sentences, and a whole web page into different languages.
