Popular search engines such as Google, Yahoo and Ask.com were all founded in the 1990s. Their mission? To help organise the plethora of information available on the internet.
Yahoo was incorporated in 1995; Ask Jeeves was founded in 1996 (and later renamed Ask.com); Google was incorporated in 1998. These search engines helped ordinary people and employees access online information more easily than ever before.
AltaVista is de naam van een internetzoekmachine en die van het bedrijf dat deze zoekmachine beheert. De naam betekent "zicht van boven". AltaVista ontstond in 1995 toen het bedrijf Digital Equipment Corporation het lanceerde op altavista.digital.com. Van daaruit ontwikkelde het zich verder tot een internetbrede, populaire zoekmachine die in de late jaren 90 veel nieuwe eigenschappen introduceerde. Latere bedrijven namen die ook in hun zoekmachines op. Een voorbeeld daarvan is het zoeken op gehele frasen door gebruik te maken van aanhalingstekens.
In 1996 ging AltaVista een samenwerking aan met Yahoo. Twee jaar later, in 1998, werd Digital verkocht aan Compaq, dat de zoekmachine een jaar later herlanceerde als een portaalsite. Dit deed de bezoekersaantallen geen goed, zeker met Google in opkomst. Compaq verkocht het bedrijf dan ook weer, waarna Altavista uiteindelijk in 2004 in handen zou vallen van Yahoo.
AltaVista was created by researchers at Digital Equipment Corporation's Western Research Laboratory who were trying to provide services to make finding files on the public network easier.[3] Although there is some dispute about who was responsible for the original idea,[4] two key participants were Louis Monier, 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 15 December 1995 at altavista.digital.com.[5][6]
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.[7] 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.[3] AltaVista itself became one of the top destinations on the web, and by 1997 would earn US$50.5 million in sponsorship revenue.[4]
[edit] 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.[8] 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.[9] 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.[10] 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.[11]
In February 2003, AltaVista was bought by Overture Services, Inc.[12] In July 2003, Overture itself was taken over by Yahoo!.[13]
In December 2010, a Yahoo employee leaked PowerPoint slides that the search engine would be shut down as part of a consolidation at Yahoo.[14] In May 2011, the shut down commenced, and AltaVista's search panel was replaced with a Yahoo! search, with all results returned on a Yahoo! page.
1995: spring: project started by Louis Monier
1995: 04Jul: first spidering by Scooter
1995: 15Dec: site goes public at www.altavista.digital.com
1996: Jun: partners with Yahoo (until Jul 1998)
1996: Oct: www.altavista.com mimics Digital's page [Wayback]
1997: 11Dec: first mentions of babelfish.altavista on Usenet [Wayback]
1998: Feb: real site [Wayback]; fake site [Wayback]
1998: Jun: Compaq buys Digital (and Altavista) for $9B [cite]
1998: Jun: site redesign
1998? Compaq pays $3M for www.altavista.com domain [cite]
1998: 12Dec: [Wayback]
1999: Jan: Compaq spins off Altavista as subsidiary, plans IPO, chooses Rod Schrock as CEO [cite]
1999: May: [Wayback]
1999: 29Jun: CMGI buys AltaVista from Compaq for $2.3B [article]
1999: 10Sep: AV stops spidering! [report]
1999: 08Oct: announces site relaunch for 25Oct, $120M ad campaign [CNet]
1999: 05Oct: [Wayback]
1999: 12Oct: [Wayback]
1999: 05Nov: critique [article]
1999: 15Nov: redesigned site [Wayback]
1999: 29Nov: AV buys Raging Bull [article]
1999: 17Dec: AV files for $300M IPO [article]
2000: May: AV launches Raging Search [CNet]
2000: 15Sep: 225 layoffs [cite]
2000: 09Oct: droll critique [article]
2000: 19Oct: CEO Rod Schrock resigns [CNet]
2001: 18Jan: 200 more layoffs [cite]
2001: 06Apr: CMGI rumored to need to sell AV [article]
2001: 18Sep: layoffs, new CEO [article]
