And by 1997, it was attracting 80 million visitors daily. One year later in 1996, it was serving 19 million visitors each day. On its launch day in 1995, the new search engine saw around 300,000 visitors. However, Digital underestimated just how much users would love AltaVista. AltaVista’s popularity as a search engine was secondary to Digital’s goal of showing what its server could do. But Digital saw AltaVista as a useful demo of its computer hardware capabilities a marketing tool.
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The New York Times noted that AltaVista enabled users to carry out “highly targeted searches”, and referred to AltaVista’s tech as a “super spider.”Īt first, there was some uncertainty around whether AltaVista would continue to be provided free to the general public, or whether users would be asked to pay. The launch of AltaVista was a noted event in the media in 1995, largely due to the power of Digital’s AlphaServer hardware. And it gave them more control over results, too. Visitors could suddenly access more content than ever before, simply because AltaVista was better at indexing the furthest reaches of the web. It indexed around ten times the number of pages that competing search engines could handle. The Rise of AltaVistaĪltaVista quickly became a hit with web users. Paul Flaherty is credited with coming up with the idea for AltaVista, while Michael Burrows is credited for writing the indexer itself.Īfter being tested with Digital’s 10,000 employees, the AltaVista search engine was rolled out to the general public on December 15th of the same year. Scooter completed its first complete web crawl in August 1995, returning around 10 million pages to the primitive AltaVista index. He was a computer scientist at Digital’s Western Research Lab. Louis Monier created the web crawler tool, Scooter. Tony Johnson, Stanford UniversityĪltaVista’s name came from the scenic views in Palo Alto, where Digital was based. A search engine was an obvious demonstration of its might. With its 64-bit processor, it could search very large databases very quickly. In fact, AltaVista was essentially a test case for one of Digital’s supercomputers, the AlphaServer 8400 TurboLaser. ThisDayInTechHistory has a screenshot of its original homepage design.ĪltaVista was not created to take the internet by storm, or tap into a booming commercial opportunity that its developers had spotted. Enter ĪltaVista was officially launched in 1995 by Digital Equipment Corporation, which was known simply as ‘Digital.’ Digital was the original owner of the domain that you’re reading now That’s why AltaVista’s original URL used a subdomain of it:. Ironically, the search engine that eventually filled this position did so almost by accident. There was a clear opportunity for a new competitor to offer a complete search database, compiled through automated scanning. W3Catalog was the first search engine to automatically harvest website data and format it in a searchable database, but it relied upon other directories for its listings. And they couldn’t automatically find new websites, either. Once the web began to explode in popularity, there was no way they could cover every site.Īll search engines or directories had a shared problem they all showed different results. Naturally, manually created directories had a limited lifespan.
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Various search engines offered lists of the content available online, compiled using user submissions and manual indexing. (An archived copy is still available online.) It was a manual record of all of the websites that users had published. When Tim Berners-Lee first created the web, he compiled a Virtual Library. Despite being a pioneer, and far more advanced than its competitors, it proved fallible when its users deserted it. The demise of AltaVista is a cautionary tale for any successful online business. But Google didn’t take long to dispose of its rival and force it into the arms of Yahoo. When AltaVista was in its prime, Google didn’t exist.
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It pioneered many techniques that search engines still use today, and was the first tool to index the full text content of web pages. In the early days of the web, AltaVista broke ground in search technology. Google is currently the leading search engine by a large margin, but it owes a lot to AltaVista.
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