AltaVista

AltaVista is a web search engine that Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) launched in 1995. Among the first widely used search tools, it offered a fast, broad index of the web and a straightforward query interface. The name AltaVista is Spanish for “high view” or “high vantage point.” The service helped popularize public web search in the early online era.

The engine was notable for its speed and scale, indexing a large portion of the web and providing features that influenced later systems. It supported advanced query syntax and offered multilingual capabilities. In 1997, AltaVista introduced Babelfish, an online translation tool that allowed users to translate text between several languages and was later integrated into other services.

In the late 1990s AltaVista gained substantial market share and became a dominant gateway to the web. Following DEC’s acquisition by Compaq in 1998, the AltaVista brand changed hands several times. In 2003, AltaVista was acquired by Overture Services, a paid-search company, and Overture was later acquired by Yahoo. Yahoo gradually integrated AltaVista’s assets into its search platform, and the standalone AltaVista search service was discontinued in 2013, with users redirected to Yahoo Search.

Legacy: AltaVista is remembered as an influential early web search engine that helped shape indexing speed and user expectations for online search. It also contributed to the development of online translation through Babelfish and to later search advertising models via its later corporate owners.