# AltaVista

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.

## 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".

## 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. Paul Flaherty came up with the original idea, 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.
Ilene H. Lang was the founding CEO of AltaVista after being recruited by Digital Equipment Corporation to build its software business.
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.

## Popularity

AltaVista was the first searchable, full-text database on the World Wide Web with a simple interface. Another distinguishing feature of AltaVista was its minimalistic interface, which was lost when it became a Web portal, but regained when it refocused its efforts on its search function. It also allowed the user to limit search results from a domain, reducing the likelihood of multiple results from the same source.
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. The AltaVista site became one of the top destinations on the Web, and in 1997 it earned US$50 million in sponsorship revenue. It was the 11th most visited Web site in 1998 and in 2000.
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.
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.
In 2000, AltaVista was used by 17.7% of Internet users while Google was used by only 7% of Internet users, according to Media Metrix.

## Technology

As of 1998, AltaVista is based on weighted boolean search. There are two major search modes: simple querying and advanced querying.

### Query format

A "simple query" looks like `word1 word2 "phrase" -word3 +word4` which is interpreted as "(word1 OR word2 OR "phrase") AND NOT word3 AND word4". Words within double quotes are phrases: they must be adjacent in a document for the document to match the query. A "query term" is a word or a phrase. An "advanced query" is an explicit Boolean expression. In advanced query mode, `and`, `or`, and `not` are interpreted as Boolean operators rather than as search terms. Advanced queries may also include `near`: the words on either side of `near` must be close -- but not necessarily adjacent.
Both simple and advanced queries support `host:xx.yy.zz` which queries only documents found on the hostname (web domain) `xx.yy.zz`. A pull-down menu allows the user to restrict result pages only to pages in a particular language. In the advanced search, an input box allows the user to restrict the results to pages last modified on a certain date, or within a range of dates.
AltaVista returned URLs ranked by its internal "relevance function". Each page contains 10 URLs. The user may click on "3", for instance, to get to the 21st-30th most relevant URLs. This differed from some other search engines, where the user can jump to only the next 10 or previous 10 URLs.

### Query log

AltaVista logs user requests in a "query log" A request may consist of a new query or a new result screen for a previously submitted query. Each request includes the following fields: Unix timestamp for the query; cookie (blank if the user has disabled cookies); query terms; result URLs; other user-specified query modifiers, such as a restriction on the result pages' language or date of last modification; metadata, such as whether the query is a simple or an advanced query, the browser the submitter is using, the IP address of the submitting host, etc.
AltaVista collected session information to study querying behavior. A "session" is a series of queries by a single user made clustered within a small range of time. Queries with the same cookie are assumed to come from the same user. For those 4% of queries in which the user has disallowed cookies, then the pair "domain IP / web browser used" was used. It was a poor substitute for cookies, particularly for large ISPs such as AOL, where ~10,000 of users shared a single IP address.

## 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. 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 CMGI, an Internet investment company. CMGI filed for an initial public offering (IPO) for AltaVista to take place in April 2000, but when the Internet bubble collapsed, the IPO was cancelled. Meanwhile, it became clear that AltaVista's Web portal strategy was unsuccessful, and the search service began losing market share, especially to Google. After a series of layoffs and several management changes, AltaVista gradually shed its portal features and refocused on search. By 2002, AltaVista had improved the quality and freshness of its results and redesigned its user interface.
In February 2003, AltaVista was bought by Overture Services, Inc. for $140 million. In July 2003, Overture was taken over by Yahoo!. After Yahoo! purchased Overture, AltaVista used the same search index as Yahoo! Search - the same search engine it had provided results to previously.
In December 2010, a Yahoo! employee leaked PowerPoint slides indicating that the search engine would shut down as part of a consolidation at Yahoo!.

## Free services

AltaVista provided Babel Fish, a Web-based machine translation application that translated text or webpages from one of several languages into another. It was later superseded by Yahoo! Babel Fish in May 2008 and now redirects to Bing's translation service.
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.

## 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. They implemented it specifically to prevent bots from adding URLs to their web search engine.

## Shutdown

On June 28, 2013, Yahoo! announced on its Tumblr page that AltaVista would shut down on July 8, 2013; since that date, visits to AltaVista's home page redirect to Yahoo!'s main page.