AltaVista was a Web search engine established in 1995. It became one of the most-used early search engines, but lost ground to Google and was purchased by Yahoo! in 2003, which retained the brand, but based all AltaVista searches on its own search engine. On July 8, 2013, the service was shut down by Yahoo!, and since then the domain has redirected to Yahoo!'s own search site.
What is Altavista?
AltaVista was the first searchable, full-text database on the World Wide Web with a simple interface. As of 1998, it used 20 multi-processor machines using DEC 's 64-bit Alpha processor.
How many hits does Altavista get?
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.
Why did Altavista fail?
AltaVista failed because of its alternating ownership, due to a failed shift towards becoming a portal, as well as its core search business was eventually overtaken by Google. What Is AltaVista? AltaVista was a search engine as well as a web portal that allowed users to browse the world wide web as well as UseNet.
Why is Altavista better than other search engines?
It was faster than all the rest, and it produced more results than all the rest. Today we take 15 pages of search results for granted, but Altavista was the first engine to produce those kinds of results. Altavista launched in late 1995. I honestly don’t think I tried any other search engine for a couple of years after that.
Is AltaVista still around?
All of the search technology that had been built up under the AltaVista brand was absorbed into Yahoo search in 2011, just as its search results had been co-opted by Yahoo 15 years earlier. Yahoo closed AltaVista quietly in 2013.
Is AltaVista a search engine of Internet?
AltaVista is a popular search engine on the Web. In addition to full-text searches, AltaVista can also search graphic images and tell you who is linked to your own Web pages.
Who created AltaVista?
The software behind AltaVista was created by US computer scientists Paul Flaherty and Louis Monier and Briton Michael Burrows while all three worked in the research labs of DEC (Digital Equipment Corporation).
Can you still Ask Jeeves?
Ask Jeeves / Ask.com Ask Jeeves lasted until roughly 2005, when it was rebranded as Ask.com. The company attempted to invade Yahoo Answers' territory by focusing on a real-person Q&A site, but Ask.com ended its foray into search engineering in 2010. Ask.com is ranked No. 128 in the world, according to Alexa.
Who is the best search engine?
Google. With over 70% of the search market share, Google is undoubtedly the most popular search engine. ... Bing. Bing, Google's biggest contender, rakes in 33% of U.S. searches and also powers Yahoo, the U.S.'s third biggest search engine. ... Baidu. ... 4. Yahoo! ... Ask.com. ... DuckDuckGo.
Is DuckDuckGo a general search engine?
Try the "Advanced Search" feature. DuckDuckGo is a non-tracking search engine. As a "metasearch engine," DuckDuckGo gets its results from many sources, including Bing, Yahoo!, WolframAlpha, and its own web crawler.
What was Ask Jeeves?
Ask.com (originally known as Ask Jeeves) is a question answering–focused e-business founded in 1996 by Garrett Gruener and David Warthen in Berkeley, California. Oakland, California, U.S. The original software was implemented by Gary Chevsky, from his own design.
Why did AltaVista fail?
AltaVista was a search engine as well as a web portal that allowed users to browse the world wide web as well as UseNet. AltaVista failed because of its alternating ownership, due to a failed shift towards becoming a portal, as well as its core search business was eventually overtaken by Google.
What was before Google?
We Used Yahoo, Lycos, or AltaVista for Search Before Google became synonymous with looking things up on the Internet, Yahoo, which first indexed the web, was the number two most popular site online.
What is the best UK search engine?
GoogleGoogle had the highest market share by far with 86.31 percent of the desktop, tablet and console search engine market in the UK. After Google came Bing with a market share of 9.61 percent, followed by the Yahoo! search engine with 2.36 percent and DuckDuckGo with 1.01 percent.
What is the oldest search engine?
WebCrawlerOf all still-surviving search engines, WebCrawler is the oldest search engine that is still active. Today, it aggregates results from Google and Yahoo; it abandoned its own database in 2001.
What happened to Lycos?
Lycos, which developed one of the first crawler-based search engines, was sold to Spanish Internet company Terra Networks for $12.5 billion in stock at the height of the Internet bubble in 2000.
What is Altavista search engine?
Altavista was a pioneering search engine developed by a group of Digital Equipment (DEC) researchers. It was originally created to showcase the power of a then-revolutionary DEC supercomputer.
How did Compaq change the search engine?
To that end, Compaq turned the search engine into a complex web portal by removing the simple interface users had grown accustomed to. Over time, the homepage became increasingly cluttered. To beat Yahoo, Compaq had made AltaVista more like its competitors and thus eroded its point of difference.
When did Altavista get acquired?
AltaVista was then sold to Overture in 2003 for $140 million, itself acquired by Yahoo four months later. The acquisition by Yahoo marked the beginning of the end for AltaVista, with its once-mighty search technology absorbed into the Yahoo platform.
When did Yahoo acquire Altavista?
Yahoo acquired AltaVista in 2003 and absorbed the technology behind the search engine into its own platform. AltaVista was formally put to rest ten years later.
Is Altavista bad for Yahoo?
In 1996, AltaVista began providing search results for search queries performed on the Yahoo website. The partnership with Yahoo was not inherently bad for AltaVista, but it did precipitate a series of events that would cause the search engine to fall out of favor.
How much RAM does Altavista have?
From what I can tell, in its heyday Altavista’s cluster of servers had 130 GB of RAM, 500 GB of storage, and about 50 CPU cores, which likely ran at a speed of 433 MHz or less. A former coworker of mine decided to build a mind-blowing computer this summer, using a server-grade motherboard with a couple of Intel Core i7 CPUs. Chances are he has as much computing power sitting in an ATX case under his desk as Altavista had, if not more. It’ll easily be five years–at least–before I’m willing to spend the money on that kind of computing power, but if and when I do, I’ll probably name that machine altavista in honor of the late, great search engine.
When did Compaq buy DEC?
Compaq bought DEC in 1998 , mostly to get its services division. Compaq didn’t care much about the rest of DEC, although Altavista certainly seemed to interest Compaq more than the CPU technology that powered it. But Altavista interested Compaq more as a business to spin off to make its investors happy than anything else.
When was Altavista launched?
Today we take 15 pages of search results for granted, but Altavista was the first engine to produce those kinds of results. Altavista launched in late 1995.
Was Altavista a success?
Altavista was a colossal marketing failure. It was also a tremendous search engine for its day. It was faster than all the rest, and it produced more results than all the rest. Today we take 15 pages of search results for granted, but Altavista was the first engine to produce those kinds of results.
Background
- AltaVista was a search engine created in 1995 by a group of researchers attempting to make finding files on a public networkeasier. It had two distinct advantages over other search engines of the time. For one, it utilized a fast, multi-threaded crawler that could cover many more web pages than were believed to exist on the internet in the 90s. AltaVista also employed an efficien…
Yahoo Partnership and Sale to Compaq
- In 1996, AltaVista began providing search results for search queries performed on the Yahoo website. The partnership with Yahoo was not inherently bad for AltaVista, but it did precipitate a series of events that would cause the search engine to fall out of favor. Two years later, Compaq acquired Digital Equipment (DEC) – the owner of AltaVista – for $9.6 billion. Compaq was less i…
CMGI and Overture Acquisitions
- Struggling to make AltaVista profitable, Compaq sold an 83% stake to the owner of the Lycos search engine CMGI in 1999. However, a failed IPO meant staff were made redundant at CMGI as it too struggled to make money from AltaVista. In an attempt to claw back market share from Google, the search engine belatedly reverted to a simple search form. AltaVista was then sold t…
Key Takeaways
- Altavista was a pioneering search engine developed by a group of Digital Equipment (DEC) researchers. It was originally created to showcase the power of a then-revolutionary DEC supercomputer.
- After an ominous partnership with Yahoo in 1996, AltaVista underwent a series of acquisitions and format charges as several companies tried to make it profitable. In the process, the sear…
- Altavista was a pioneering search engine developed by a group of Digital Equipment (DEC) researchers. It was originally created to showcase the power of a then-revolutionary DEC supercomputer.
- After an ominous partnership with Yahoo in 1996, AltaVista underwent a series of acquisitions and format charges as several companies tried to make it profitable. In the process, the search engine...
- Yahoo acquired AltaVista in 2003 and absorbed the technology behind the search engine into its own platform. AltaVista was formally put to rest ten years later.
