AltaVista
URL | www |
---|---|
Advertising | Yes |
Registration | No |
Launched | December 15, 1995 |
Current status | Defunct (July 8, 2013[1] | )
AltaVista was a
Etymology
The word "AltaVista" is formed from the words for "high view" or "upper view" in Spanish (alta + vista); thus, it colloquially translates to "overview".[2][3]
Origins
AltaVista was created by researchers at Digital Equipment Corporation's Network Systems Laboratory and Western Research Laboratory who were trying to provide services to make finding files on the public network easier.[4] Paul Flaherty came up with the original idea,[5][6] along with Louis Monier and Michael Burrows, who 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.[7][8]
Ilene H. Lang was the founding CEO of AltaVista after being recruited by Digital Equipment Corporation to build its software business.[9]
At launch, the service had two innovations that put it ahead of other search engines available at the time: It used a fast, multi-threaded crawler (Scooter) that could cover many more Web pages than were believed to exist at the time, and it had an efficient back-end search, running on advanced hardware.[10]
Popularity and technologies
AltaVista was the first searchable, full-text database on the World Wide Web with a simple interface.[11]
As of 1998, it used 20
AltaVista's site was an immediate success. Traffic increased steadily from 300,000 hits on the first day to more than 80 million hits per day two years later. The ability to search the Web, and AltaVista's service in particular, became the subject of numerous articles and even some books.[4] The AltaVista site became one of the top destinations on the Web, and in 1997 it earned US$50 million in sponsorship revenue.[13] It was the 11th most visited Web site in 1998 and in 2000.[14]
AltaVista was the most favored search engine used by professional researchers at the "Internet Search-Off" study in February 1998, with 45 percent of the researchers choosing it. Second place belonged to HotBot at 20 percent.[15]
By using the data collected by the crawler, employees from AltaVista, together with others from IBM and Compaq, were the first to analyze the strength of connections within the budding World Wide Web in a seminal study in 2000.[16]
In 2000, AltaVista was used by 17.7% of Internet users while
Business transactions
In 1996, AltaVista became the exclusive provider of search results for Yahoo!. In 1998, Digital was sold to Compaq, and in 1999, Compaq redesigned AltaVista as a Web portal, hoping to compete with Yahoo!. Under CEO Rod Schrock, AltaVista abandoned its streamlined search page and focused on adding features such as shopping and free e-mail.[18] In June 1998, Compaq paid AltaVista Technology Incorporated (ATI) $3.3 million for the domain name altavista.com – Jack Marshall, cofounder of ATI, had registered the name in 1994.
In June 1999, Compaq sold a majority stake in AltaVista to
In February 2003, AltaVista was bought by
In December 2010, a Yahoo! employee leaked PowerPoint slides indicating that the search engine would shut down as part of a consolidation at Yahoo!.[24]
Free services
AltaVista provided
AltaVista also provided a free email service which had 200,000 active registered email accounts using the "altavista.com" domain and others before shutting down in March 2002. Domestic US accounts were closed; others were sold to Mail.com.[27][28]
First CAPTCHA system
To fight against an increasing number of malicious internet bots, AltaVista implemented the first practical CAPTCHA schemes to protect against fraudulent account registrations.[29][30][31] They implemented it specifically to prevent bots from adding URLs to their web search engine.[30]
Shutdown
On June 28, 2013, Yahoo! announced on its Tumblr page that AltaVista would shut down on July 8, 2013;[32][33][34] since that date, visits to AltaVista's home page redirect to Yahoo!'s main page.[1]
See also
References
- ^ a b c Rossiter, Jay (June 28, 2013). "Keeping our Focus on What's Next". yahoo.tumblr.com. Retrieved June 16, 2019.
- ^ a b c "Search engine rankings on Alta Vista: a brief history of the AltaVista search engine". websearchworkshop.co.uk. Retrieved July 22, 2018.
- ^ Sherman, Chris (October 8, 2003). "What's In A (Search Engine's) Name?". Search Engine Watch. Archived from the original on January 3, 2015. Retrieved September 3, 2019.
- ^ ISBN 978-0-07-882435-7.
- ^ Alleman, Andrew (June 1, 2011). "Viking Office Products Tries to Take Sentimental Domain Name from Altavista Inventor's Widow". Domain Name Wire.
- ^ Daniel B. Banks Jr. (May 31, 2011). "National Arbitration Forum Decision Claim Number: FA1104001383534". ADR Forum. Archived from the original on June 22, 2012. Retrieved January 28, 2012.
- ^ Lewis, Peter H. (December 18, 1995). "Digital Equipment Offers Web Browsers Its 'Super Spider'". The New York Times.
- ^ Digital Press and Analysts News (December 15, 1995). "Digital Develops Internet's First 'Super Spider'". Newsgroup: biz.digital.announce. Retrieved February 26, 2007.
- ^ Young, Susan (May 24, 2017). "2017 Alumni Achievement Award Recipient". Harvard Business Review.
- ISBN 978-1-4549-2622-1.
- ^ a b "Short History of Early Search Engines". The History of SEO. Archived from the original on January 21, 2019. Retrieved February 5, 2019.
- ISBN 978-0-321-41691-9.
- ISBN 978-1-85788-362-6.
- ^ Barba, Ronald (December 26, 2014). "The Top 20 Most Popular Websites: 1996 to the Present [INFOGRAPHIC]". tech.co.
- ^ Feldman, Susan. "The Internet Search-Off". Information Today. Archived from the original on December 5, 1998.
- ^ Broder, Andrei; Kumar, Ravi; Maghoul, Farzin; Raghavan, Prabhakar; Rajagopalan, Sridhar; Stata, Raymie; Tomkins, Andrew; Wiener, Janet. Graph structure in the web (PDF). 9th International WWW Conference, Amsterdam, May 2000.
- ^ Patsuris, Penelope (October 20, 2000). "Don't Count AltaVista Out Yet". Forbes.
- ^ Kopytoff, Verne (March 27, 2000). "AltaVista Switches Web Portal Into High Gear / Revamped site adds new services". San Francisco Chronicle.
- ^ Afzali, Cyrus (June 29, 1999). "CMGI Acquires 83 Percent of AltaVista for $2.3 Billion". internet.com.
- ^ Barnes, Cecily (January 10, 2001). "AltaVista cancels proposed IPO". news.com. Archived from the original on January 4, 2013.
- ^ Glasner, Joanna (November 13, 2002). "AltaVista Makeover: A Better View". Wired.
- ^ Hansell, Saul (February 19, 2003). "Overture Services to Buy AltaVista for $140 Million". The New York Times.
- ^ "YAHOO! TO ACQUIRE OVERTURE (press release)". Yahoo! Media Relations. July 14, 2003. Archived from the original on July 8, 2007.
- ^ "RIP AltaVista, Yahoo Buzz, Delicious, MyBlogLog". Silicon Tap. December 16, 2010. Archived from the original on May 26, 2011.
- ^ "Babelfish: English". infotektur.com. May 27, 1999. Archived from the original on April 27, 1999.
- ^ "Welcoming Yahoo! Babel Fish users!". Microsoft Translator Blog. May 30, 2012.
- ^ Richardson, Tim (February 20, 2002). "AltaVista cans Web mail service". The Register.
- ^ "AltaVista to close free U.S. E-mail accounts next month". February 22, 2002.
- doi:10.1145/3397312.
- ^ a b Soto, Micah (May 24, 2019). "The origin of CAPTCHA and reCAPTCHA".
- ^ United States US6195698B1, Mark D. Lillibridge; Krishna Bharat & Martin Abadi et al., published 1998-04-13
- ^ Lepitak, Stephen (July 2, 2013). "Yahoo! announces closure of AltaVista". The Drum. Retrieved September 4, 2019.
- ^ "Yahoo shuts down internet relic AltaVista". CBC News. July 8, 2013.
- ^ "Yahoo sends search engine relic AltaVista to Internet graveyard". National Post. July 8, 2013.