ALTAVISTA

Search Engine

            AltaVista was a Web Search engine owned by Yahoo. AltaVista was once one of the most popular search engines but lost its ground due to the rise of Google. In May 2011, Yahoo! shut down the site. As of 2012, the AltaVista website is up, and it is stated on the website that they are using the Yahoo! search engine. Searches as of November 2012 utilize Yahoo! Search BOSS APIs and no longer use AltaVista branding.

Origins                                                                                            

AltaVista was created by researchers at Digital Reqruitment 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 was responsible for the original idea,  and two key participants were Louis Moiner, who wrote the Crawler, and Michael Burrows , who wrote the Indexer. The name AltaVista was chosen in relation to the surroundings of their company at Palo Alto. AltaVista was publicly launched as an internet search engine on December 15, 1995 at altavista.digital.com.

At launch, the service had two innovations which set it ahead of the other search engines: it used a fast, multi-threaded crawler (Scooter) which could cover many more Web pages than were believed to exist at the time and an efficient search running back-end on advanced hardware. As of 1998, it used 20 Multi-Processor machines using DEC's 64-bit Alpha  processor. Together, the back-end machines had 130 GB of  RAM and 500 GB of  Hard Disk space, and received 13 million queries per day. This made AltaVista the first searchable, full-text Database of a large part of the World Wide Web. The distinguishing feature of AltaVista was its minimalistic interface compared with other search engines of the time; a feature which was lost when it became a Portal, but was regained when it refocused its efforts on its search function.

AltaVista's site was an immediate success. Traffic increased steadily from 300,000 hits on the first day to more than 80 million hits a 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. AltaVista itself became one of the top destinations on the web, and by 1997 would earn US$50.5 million in sponsorship revenue.

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 features like shopping and free email. 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 for AltaVista to take place in April 2000, but as the  Internet Bubble collapsed, the IPO was cancelled. Meanwhile, it became clear that AltaVista's 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 Service  In July 2003, Overture itself was taken over by Yahoo!.

In December 2010, a Yahoo! employee leaked PowerPoint slides that the search engine would be shut down as part of a consolidation at Yahoo!. In May 2011, the shutdown commenced, and all results are now returned on a Yahoo! page. As of October 2012, the search engine still uses Yahoo's results with AltaVista branding. In November, however, searches were modified to utilize Yahoo! Search BOSS APIs and no longer use AltaVista branding.

Free services

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

Source, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AltaVista

Afril Priyanto Eka Prakoso_02_9F