Altavista

AltaVista

AltaVista is a search engine for the Internet.  It emerged from a research project of the Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC), that was presented at the end of 1995.  It was one of the first search engine which enabled the user to carry out a full search for relevant sites on the Internet.  This was developed by Louis Monier, Joella Paquette and Paul Flaherty.

History

In October 1996 the AltaVista search service used the URL http://altavista.digital.com until 1999, when Google took over the role of search engine.  The basic principle of the ranking algorithm used by AltaVista was the evaluation of the meta tags to the HTML pages.

At the same time however, indexes and text fragments from the HTML pages followed an internal logic for the classification of the links used in a ranking position.
Following the acquisition of DEC by Compaq AltaVista – altavista.com now became a separate company, which for a while was a web portal that was commercially successful.

Initially, the service was used primarily as a technology demonstration of the efficiency of the used DEC server.  Meanwhile, experts at AltaVista Search had given up activities. The size of companies included in the search Web sites is now much less substantial than that of Google.  Six years after launch in February 2003, AltaVista was the now ailing company acquired by Overture, surprisingly developing a company search technique which since 2003 has been owned by Yahoo Inc.
Services

The service, developed by AltaVista Babel Fish was the first Internet machine translation service, to translate the words, phrases or entire Web sites into different languages.