What is AltaVista?

AltaVista was once a very popular search engine on the Internet, which offered the option of image searches in addition to full-text searches. The search robot “Scooter” combed through three million websites every day and collected data, while the indexer “Ni2” indexed one gigabyte of data per hour. This search engine was developed in 1995 by Digital’s Research Labs in Palo Alto and was available in over 25 languages and various versions. In 2003, AltaVista was acquired by Overture, which in turn was acquired by Yahoo! in the same year. AltaVista’s search was finally redirected to Yahoo! in 2011.

How does the search engine work?

AltaVista was mainly based on a crawler that used its own technology to create a website index. In addition to automatic crawling, AltaVista also enabled the manual addition of websites and paid submissions. The ranking algorithm takes into account factors such as the occurrence of the keyword in the title, in the meta description and at the beginning of the text. Relevance penalties were imposed when spam practices such as invisible text or repeated keywords occurred.

What search options did AltaVista offer?

AltaVista not only offered a full-text search, but also special functions such as the image search, where the search service relied on surrounding texts to understand the content of the images. There was also a music file search and a video search that presented content from both the web crawl and partner sites.

What other products were offered?

In addition to the search function, AltaVista offered a shopping service for comparing prices of products at online retailers. However, this service was discontinued in the fall of 2001. AltaVista also launched a news search engine called AltaVista News, which aggregated articles from websites across the Internet.

The history of AltaVista reflects not only its own development, but also the evolution of the search engine landscape as a whole. Although AltaVista is no longer active, its legacy as a pioneer in the world of Internet search technology remains.