AltaVista

Last updated

AltaVista
Altavista logo.png
Altavista-1999.png
Top: 2002–2013 AltaVista logo
Bottom: The AltaVista web portal in 1999
Type of site
 Search engine
Available in Multilingual
Founded1995;29 years ago (1995)
Headquarters
Palo Alto, California
,
U.S.
Key people Ilene H. Lang, Paul Flaherty, Louis Monier, Michael Burrows, Jeffrey Black
Parent Digital Equipment Corporation (1998)
Overture Services (2003)
Yahoo (2003–2013)
Yahoo! Inc. (2017–present)
URL www.altavista.com
Advertising Yes
RegistrationNo
LaunchedDecember 15, 1995;29 years ago (1995-12-15)
Current statusDefunct (July 8, 2013 (2013-07-08)) [1]

AltaVista was a web search engine established in 1995. It became one of the most-used early search engines, but lost ground to Google and was purchased by Yahoo! in 2003, which retained the brand, but based all AltaVista searches on its own search engine. On July 8, 2013, the service was shut down by Yahoo!, and since then the domain has redirected to Yahoo!'s own search site. [1]

Contents

Etymology

The word "AltaVista" is formed from the words for "high view" or "upper view" in Spanish (alta + vista); thus, it colloquially translates to "overview". [2] [3]

Origins

AltaVista was created by researchers at Digital Equipment Corporation's Network Systems Laboratory and Western Research Laboratory who were trying to provide services to make finding files on the public network easier. [4] Paul Flaherty came up with the original idea, [5] [6] along with Louis Monier and Michael Burrows, who wrote the Web crawler and indexer, respectively. The name "AltaVista" was chosen in relation to the surroundings of their company at Palo Alto, California. AltaVista publicly launched as an Internet search engine on December 15, 1995. [7] [8]

Ilene H. Lang was the founding CEO of AltaVista after being recruited by Digital Equipment Corporation to build its software business. [9]

At launch, the service had two innovations that put it ahead of other search engines available at the time: It used a fast, multi-threaded crawler (Scooter) that could cover many more Web pages than were believed to exist at the time, and it had an efficient back-end search, running on advanced hardware. [10]

Popularity

The AltaVista home page in 1996, showing the simple search interface Altavista-1996.png
The AltaVista home page in 1996, showing the simple search interface

AltaVista was the first searchable, full-text database on the World Wide Web with a simple interface. [11] Another distinguishing feature of AltaVista was its minimalistic interface, which was lost when it became a Web portal, but regained when it refocused its efforts on its search function. It also allowed the user to limit search results from a domain, reducing the likelihood of multiple results from the same source.

AltaVista's site was an immediate success. Traffic increased steadily from 300,000 hits on the first day to more than 80 million hits per 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. [4] The AltaVista site became one of the top destinations on the Web, and in 1997 it earned US$50 million in sponsorship revenue. [12] It was the 11th most visited Web site in 1998 and in 2000. [13]

AltaVista was the most favored search engine used by professional researchers at the "Internet Search-Off" study in February 1998, with 45 percent of the researchers choosing it. Second place belonged to HotBot at 20 percent. [14]

By using the data collected by the crawler, employees from AltaVista, together with others from IBM and Compaq, were the first to analyze the strength of connections within the budding World Wide Web in a seminal study in 2000. [15]

In 2000, AltaVista was used by 17.7% of Internet users while Google was used by only 7% of Internet users, according to Media Metrix. [16]

Technology

As of 1998, [17] AltaVista is based on weighted boolean search. There are two major search modes: simple querying and advanced querying.

Query format

A "simple query" looks like `word1 word2 "phrase" -word3 +word4` which is interpreted as "(word1 OR word2 OR "phrase") AND NOT word3 AND word4". Words within double quotes are phrases: they must be adjacent in a document for the document to match the query. A "query term" is a word or a phrase. An "advanced query" is an explicit Boolean expression. In advanced query mode, `and`, `or`, and `not` are interpreted as Boolean operators rather than as search terms. Advanced queries may also include `near`: the words on either side of `near` must be close -- but not necessarily adjacent.

Both simple and advanced queries support `host:xx.yy.zz` which queries only documents found on the hostname (web domain) `xx.yy.zz`. A pull-down menu allows the user to restrict result pages only to pages in a particular language. In the advanced search, an input box allows the user to restrict the results to pages last modified on a certain date, or within a range of dates.

AltaVista returned URLs ranked by its internal "relevance function". Each page contains 10 URLs. The user may click on "3", for instance, to get to the 21st-30th most relevant URLs. This differed from some other search engines, where the user can jump to only the next 10 or previous 10 URLs.

Query log

AltaVista logs user requests in a "query log" A request may consist of a new query or a new result screen for a previously submitted query. Each request includes the following fields: Unix timestamp for the query; cookie (blank if the user has disabled cookies); query terms; result URLs; other user-specified query modifiers, such as a restriction on the result pages' language or date of last modification; metadata, such as whether the query is a simple or an advanced query, the browser the submitter is using, the IP address of the submitting host, etc.

AltaVista collected session information to study querying behavior. A "session" is a series of queries by a single user made clustered within a small range of time. Queries with the same cookie are assumed to come from the same user. For those 4% of queries in which the user has disallowed cookies, then the pair "domain IP / web browser used" was used. It was a poor substitute for cookies, particularly for large ISPs such as AOL, where ~10,000 of users shared a single IP address.

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 adding features such as shopping and free e-mail. [18] 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. [19] CMGI filed for an initial public offering (IPO) for AltaVista to take place in April 2000, but when the Internet bubble collapsed, the IPO was cancelled. [20] Meanwhile, it became clear that AltaVista's Web 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. [21]

In February 2003, AltaVista was bought by Overture Services, Inc. for $140 million. [22] In July 2003, Overture was taken over by Yahoo!. [23] After Yahoo! purchased Overture, AltaVista used the same search index as Yahoo! Search - the same search engine it had provided results to previously. [2]

In December 2010, a Yahoo! employee leaked PowerPoint slides indicating that the search engine would shut down as part of a consolidation at Yahoo!. [24]

Free services

AltaVista provided Babel Fish, a Web-based machine translation application that translated text or webpages from one of several languages into another. [25] It was later superseded by Yahoo! Babel Fish in May 2008 and now redirects to Bing's translation service. [2] [26] [11]

AltaVista also provided a free email service which had 200,000 active registered email accounts using the "altavista.com" domain and others before shutting down in March 2002. Domestic US accounts were closed; others were sold to Mail.com. [27] [28]

First CAPTCHA system

To fight against an increasing number of malicious internet bots, AltaVista implemented the first practical CAPTCHA schemes to protect against fraudulent account registrations. [29] [30] [31] They implemented it specifically to prevent bots from adding URLs to their web search engine. [30]

Shutdown

On June 28, 2013, Yahoo! announced on its Tumblr page that AltaVista would shut down on July 8, 2013; [32] [33] [34] since that date, visits to AltaVista's home page redirect to Yahoo!'s main page. [1]

See also

Related Research Articles

In computing, a search engine is an information retrieval software system designed to help find information stored on one or more computer systems. Search engines discover, crawl, transform, and store information for retrieval and presentation in response to user queries. The search results are usually presented in a list and are commonly called hits. The most widely used type of search engine is a web search engine, which searches for information on the World Wide Web.

Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of improving the quality and quantity of website traffic to a website or a web page from search engines. SEO targets unpaid search traffic rather than direct traffic, referral traffic, social media traffic, or paid traffic.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Babel Fish (website)</span> Former multilingual translation website

Yahoo! Babel Fish was a free Web-based machine translation service by Yahoo!. In May 2012 it was replaced by Bing Translator, to which queries were redirected. Although Yahoo! has transitioned its Babel Fish translation services to Bing Translator, it did not sell its translation application to Microsoft outright. As the oldest free online language translator, the service translated text or Web pages in 36 pairs between 13 languages, including English, Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese, Dutch, French, German, Greek, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Russian, and Spanish.

Internet research is the practice of using Internet information, especially free information on the World Wide Web, or Internet-based resources in research.

The deep web, invisible web, or hidden web are parts of the World Wide Web whose contents are not indexed by standard web search-engine programs. This is in contrast to the "surface web", which is accessible to anyone using the Internet. Computer scientist Michael K. Bergman is credited with inventing the term in 2001 as a search-indexing term.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Dogpile</span> Metasearch engine

Dogpile is a metasearch engine for information on the World Wide Web that fetches results from Google, Yahoo!, Yandex, Bing, and other popular search engines, including those from audio and video content providers such as Yahoo!.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Metasearch engine</span> Online information retrieval tool

A metasearch engine is an online information retrieval tool that uses the data of a web search engine to produce its own results. Metasearch engines take input from a user and immediately query search engines for results. Sufficient data is gathered, ranked, and presented to the users.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Yahoo Native</span> Internet advertising service provided by Yahoo

Yahoo! Native is a native "Pay per click" Internet advertising service provided by Yahoo.

Yahoo! Search is a search engine owned and operated by Yahoo!, using Microsoft Bing to power results.

In text processing, a proximity search looks for documents where two or more separately matching term occurrences are within a specified distance, where distance is the number of intermediate words or characters. In addition to proximity, some implementations may also impose a constraint on the word order, in that the order in the searched text must be identical to the order of the search query. Proximity searching goes beyond the simple matching of words by adding the constraint of proximity and is generally regarded as a form of advanced search.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Andrei Broder</span> American computer scientist

Andrei Zary Broder is a distinguished scientist at Google. Previously, he was a research fellow and vice president of computational advertising for Yahoo!, and before that, the vice president of research for AltaVista. He has also worked for IBM Research as a distinguished engineer and was CTO of IBM's Institute for Search and Text Analysis.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Go.com</span> Landing page for Disney Internet content

Go.com is a portal for Disney content that was created after The Walt Disney Company acquired the search engine Infoseek. Go.com is operated by Disney Interactive's Disney Online. It began as a web portal launched by Jeff Gold. Go.com includes content from ABC News, which is owned by Walt Disney Television and is hosted under a .go.com name. Along with Time Warner's Pathfinder.com, Go.com proved to be an expensive failure for its parent company, as web users largely preferred to use search engines to access content directly, rather than using directories. In 2013, the site was transitioned from a general-interest portal to a simple landing page.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Search engine</span> Software system for finding relevant information on the Web

A search engine is a software system that provides hyperlinks to web pages and other relevant information on the Web in response to a user's query. The user inputs a query within a web browser or a mobile app, and the search results are often a list of hyperlinks, accompanied by textual summaries and images. Users also have the option of limiting the search to a specific type of results, such as images, videos, or news.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Steel Connect</span> American software company

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Paxfire, Inc. was a startup based in Reston, Virginia founded by Mark Lewyn, a former USA Today tech reporter, and Alan Sullivan. The company filed for bankruptcy in December 2012.

Image meta search is a type of search engine specialised on finding pictures, images, animations etc. Like the text search, image search is an information retrieval system designed to help to find information on the Internet and it allows the user to look for images etc. using keywords or search phrases and to receive a set of thumbnail images, sorted by relevancy.

DNS hijacking, DNS poisoning, or DNS redirection is the practice of subverting the resolution of Domain Name System (DNS) queries. This can be achieved by malware that overrides a computer's TCP/IP configuration to point at a rogue DNS server under the control of an attacker, or through modifying the behaviour of a trusted DNS server so that it does not comply with internet standards.

The following outline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to search engines.

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">Searx</span> Metasearch engine

Searx is a discontinued free and open-source metasearch engine, available under the GNU Affero General Public License version 3, with the aim of protecting the privacy of its users. To this end, Searx does not share users' IP addresses or search history with the search engines from which it gathers results. Tracking cookies served by the search engines are blocked, preventing user-profiling-based results modification. By default, Searx queries are submitted via HTTP POST, to prevent users' query keywords from appearing in webserver logs. Searx was inspired by the Seeks project, though it does not implement Seeks' peer-to-peer user-sourced results ranking.

References

  1. 1 2 3 Rossiter, Jay (June 28, 2013). "Keeping our Focus on What's Next". yahoo.tumblr.com. Archived from the original on June 29, 2013. Retrieved June 16, 2019.
  2. 1 2 3 "Search engine rankings on Alta Vista: a brief history of the AltaVista search engine". websearchworkshop.co.uk. Retrieved July 22, 2018.
  3. ↑ Sherman, Chris (October 8, 2003). "What's In A (Search Engine's) Name?". Search Engine Watch. Archived from the original on January 3, 2015. Retrieved September 3, 2019.
  4. 1 2 Ray, Eric J.; Ray, Deborah S.; Selzer, Richard (May 1, 1998). The AltaVista Search Revolution (2nd ed.). Osborne/McGraw-Hill. ISBN   978-0-07-882435-7.
  5. ↑ Alleman, Andrew (June 1, 2011). "Viking Office Products Tries to Take Sentimental Domain Name from Altavista Inventor's Widow". Domain Name Wire.
  6. ↑ Daniel B. Banks Jr. (May 31, 2011). "National Arbitration Forum Decision Claim Number: FA1104001383534". ADR Forum. Archived from the original on June 22, 2012. Retrieved January 28, 2012.
  7. ↑ Lewis, Peter H. (December 18, 1995). "Digital Equipment Offers Web Browsers Its 'Super Spider'". The New York Times .
  8. ↑ Digital Press and Analysts News (December 15, 1995). "Digital Develops Internet's First 'Super Spider'". Newsgroup:  biz.digital.announce . Retrieved February 26, 2007.
  9. ↑ Young, Susan (May 24, 2017). "2017 Alumni Achievement Award Recipient". Harvard Business Review .
  10. ↑ Garfinkel, Simson L.; Grunspan, Rachel H. (January 15, 2019). The Computer Book: From the Abacus to Artificial Intelligence, 250 Milestones in the History of Computer Science. Union Square + ORM. p. 597. ISBN   978-1-4549-2622-1.
  11. 1 2 "Short History of Early Search Engines". The History of SEO. Archived from the original on January 21, 2019. Retrieved February 5, 2019.
  12. ↑ Battelle, John (September 14, 2006). The Search: How Google and Its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business and Transformed Our Culture. Portfolio publishing. ISBN   978-1-85788-362-6.
  13. ↑ Barba, Ronald (December 26, 2014). "The Top 20 Most Popular Websites: 1996 to the Present [INFOGRAPHIC]". tech.co.
  14. ↑ Feldman, Susan. "The Internet Search-Off". Information Today . Archived from the original on December 5, 1998.
  15. ↑ Broder, Andrei; Kumar, Ravi; Maghoul, Farzin; Raghavan, Prabhakar; Rajagopalan, Sridhar; Stata, Raymie; Tomkins, Andrew; Wiener, Janet. Graph structure in the web (PDF). 9th International WWW Conference, Amsterdam, May 2000.
  16. ↑ Patsuris, Penelope (October 20, 2000). "Don't Count AltaVista Out Yet". Forbes .
  17. ↑ Silverstein, Craig; Marais, Hannes; Henzinger, Monika; Moricz, Michael (September 1999). "Analysis of a very large web search engine query log". ACM SIGIR Forum. 33 (1): 6–12. doi:10.1145/331403.331405. ISSN   0163-5840.
  18. ↑ Kopytoff, Verne (March 27, 2000). "AltaVista Switches Web Portal Into High Gear / Revamped site adds new services". San Francisco Chronicle .
  19. ↑ Afzali, Cyrus (June 29, 1999). "CMGI Acquires 83 Percent of AltaVista for $2.3 Billion". internet.com.
  20. ↑ Barnes, Cecily (January 10, 2001). "AltaVista cancels proposed IPO". news.com. Archived from the original on January 4, 2013.
  21. ↑ Glasner, Joanna (November 13, 2002). "AltaVista Makeover: A Better View". Wired .
  22. ↑ Hansell, Saul (February 19, 2003). "Overture Services to Buy AltaVista for $140 Million". The New York Times.
  23. ↑ "YAHOO! TO ACQUIRE OVERTURE (press release)". Yahoo! Media Relations. July 14, 2003. Archived from the original on July 8, 2007.
  24. ↑ "RIP AltaVista, Yahoo Buzz, Delicious, MyBlogLog". Silicon Tap. December 16, 2010. Archived from the original on May 26, 2011.
  25. ↑ "Babelfish: English". infotektur.com. May 27, 1999. Archived from the original on April 27, 1999.
  26. ↑ "Welcoming Yahoo! Babel Fish users!". Microsoft Translator Blog. May 30, 2012.
  27. ↑ Richardson, Tim (February 20, 2002). "AltaVista cans Web mail service". The Register .
  28. ↑ "AltaVista to close free U.S. E-mail accounts next month". February 22, 2002.
  29. ↑ Feng, Yunhe; Cao, Qing; Qi, Hairong; Ruoti, Scott (June 2020). "SenCAPTCHA: A Mobile-First CAPTCHA Using Orientation Sensors". Proceedings of the ACM on Interactive, Mobile, Wearable and Ubiquitous Technologies. 4 (2). Article 43, pp. 1–26. doi: 10.1145/3397312 .
  30. 1 2 Soto, Micah (May 24, 2019). "The origin of CAPTCHA and reCAPTCHA".
  31. ↑ United States US6195698B1,Mark D. Lillibridge; Krishna Bharat& Martin Abadiet al.,published 1998-04-13
  32. ↑ Lepitak, Stephen (July 2, 2013). "Yahoo! announces closure of AltaVista". The Drum. Retrieved September 4, 2019.
  33. ↑ "Yahoo shuts down internet relic AltaVista". CBC News . July 8, 2013.
  34. ↑ "Yahoo sends search engine relic AltaVista to Internet graveyard". National Post . July 8, 2013.
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