AltaVista Search Engine turns 27 years old
Before Google was even an idea... there was AltaVista.
December 15th, 1995.
Microsoft’s Windows 95 had only been available for a couple months. Toy Story and Jumanji (the first ones, not those new-fangled sequels) dominated the box office. And Google was a few years away from even being a prototype of a search engine.
And AltaVista dominated the world of World Wide Web Search Engines.
The project was started within Digital Equipment Corporation — and provided the first “full text” searchable index of the World Wide Web that was accessible to the average Web user. Anyone who used Web search engines back in the mid 1990s knows what a huge improvement this was.
As such, AltaVista spring-boarded to become the number one search engine almost overnight.
In fact… AltaVista received 300,000 hits on the first day. The first day!
Fun fact: One side effect of AltaVista being a project inside Digital Equipment Corporation, is that the project was hosted on DEC computers. By 1998, a few short years after launch, AltaVista was running on a series of 20 DEC Alpha servers (using a total of 130 GB of RAM and 500 GB of hard drive storage)… serving 13 million unique queries every day.
Unfortunately for AltaVista… everyone and their dog wanted in on that sweet, seet “Search Engine Money.” Deals (and competition) with Yahoo!. Challenges from Googles. It was too much for the little search engine to compete with.
Spun off as it’s own company, then sold to Compaq… then to an investment firm which ultimately led to AltaVista becoming part of Yahoo! itself. Where it was, essentially, killed off in 2010.
The initial AltaVista team was made up of three key people. People who are, truly, pioneers of Internet search.
Paul Flaherty (who had the initial idea of how the web crawler would work)
Louis Monier (who programmed the crawler)
Michael Burrows (who programmed the search indexer)
Interestingly, both Louis and Michael would go on to work at Google, as Google assumed a monopoly position in the Web Search industry. Paul passed away in 2006.
As I write this, today marks the 27th birthday of AltaVista — that glorious search engine that began at Digital Equipment Corporation. Here’s to you, AltaVista! You won’t be forgotten!
It's death was the early internet idea of putting everything on the front page. Google's minimalism won the day. Which is a shame, considering, well, everything.