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AltaVista is a web search engine owned by Yahoo!. AltaVista was once one of the most popular search engines but its popularity has waned with the rise of Google.
Origins
AltaVista was created by researchers at Digital Equipment Corporations Western Research Laboratory who were trying to provide services to make finding files on the public network easier."Eric J. Ray, Deborah S. Ray, and Richard Selzer 1998"> Although there is some dispute about who was responsible for the original idea,"John Battelle 2005"> 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.
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 a lot more Web pages than were believed to exist at the time and an efficient search back-end running on advanced hardware. As of 1998, it used 20 multi-processor machines using DECs 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.Ricardo Baeza-Yates and Berthier Ribeiro-Neto (1999). Modern Information Retrieval. Addison-Wesley/ACM Press, pp. 374, 390. 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.
AltaVistas 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 AltaVi read more at » http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AltaVista
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