Noelia Ramirez Information Literacy ( CMP 230 ) Altavista.com

Origins Type Private company Foundation date 1995 Headquarters Palo Alto, California, USA Key people Paul Flaherty, Louis Monier, Michael Burrows, Jeffrey B Parent Overture Services, Yahoo! Website AltaVista.com Alexa rank 9,723 (February 2013) Type of site Search engine Advertising Yes Registration No Available in Multilingual Launched December 15, 1995 Current status Discontinued The original Alta Vista Logo

History  AltaVista was the Google of its day when it was launched in The search engine was created by Paul Flaherty (the original idea), Louis Monier (who wrote the crawler) and Michael Burrows (who wrote the indexer).  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. AltaVista itself became one of the top destinations on the web, and by 1997 would earn US$50.5 million in sponsorship revenue.  The name AltaVista was chosen in relation to the surroundings of their company at Palo Alto. AltaVista was launched as an internet search engine on December 15, 1995 at altavista.digital.com.  In 2003 AltaVista was bought by Overture Services Inc, which was then taken over by Yahoo! In 2010 Yahoo! announced its plans to discontinue the portal, which was completed in 2011.Yahoo!

AltaVista Home Page

Search Engines  Search engines are designed for people to search for information on the World Wide Web and FTP servers. The information that’s returned will be based on your search terms and may include web pages, images, information or other types of files. The World Wide Web (abbreviated as WWW or W3  Search engines are the way people search for information online. Each one has it’s own way of crawling the internet and indexing information. Each search engine may return different results because it’s looking for different signs on the website.  A web search engine is software code that is designed to search for information on the World Wide Web. The search results are generally presented in a line of results often referred to as search engine results pages

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  In June 1999, Compaq sold a majority stake in AltaVista to CMGI, an internet investment company  In February 2003, AltaVista was bought by Overture Services, Inc. In July 2003, Overture itself was taken over by Yahoo!.  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.  Yahoo! Search BOSS (Build your Own Search Service) is a Yahoo! Developer Network initiative to provide an open search web services platform

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.  Yahoo! Babel Fish was a free web-based multilingual translation application that superseded AltaVista Babel Fish in 2003 and since May of 2012 has been redirected to Bing Translator

References search-engine-history/ search-engine-history/