AltaVista, which was conceived in 1995, was created by researchers at Digital Equipment Corporation's Network Systems Laboratory and Western Research Laboratory who were just trying to make the public network more comfortable by providing services to find files easily. It was publicly launched as an internet search engine on December 15, 1995 at altavista.digital.com, three years before the launch of the legendary search engine Google. At launch, this service had two main advantages over other search engines available at the time,which were: it used a fast, multi-threaded crawler (Scooter) that could cover many webpages, approx 20 million, that were believed to exist at the time, and it had an efficient search-running back-end on advanced hardware. AltaVista search engine 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.
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 added features such as shopping and free email. In June 1999, Compaq sold a majority stake in AltaVista to CMGI, an internet investment company. In February 2003, AltaVista was bought by Overture Services. In July 2003, Yahoo overtook all the activities of Overture Services & owned AltaVista.
Yesterday, the service was shut down by Yahoo! and the domain now redirects to Yahoo!'s own search site.
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