About AltaVista

Alta Vista is a web search engine that is owned by Yahoo! Inc. A cornerstone of Alta Vista’s success is owed to the engine’s ability to index over 140 million pages. The following takes a look at facts regarding the Alta Vista search engine.

What Is Alta Vista?
Alta Vista is one of the longest ongoing search engines known in the history of the internet. Yahoo! became an internet guide in 1994, thus resulting in the launch of Alta Vista in 1995 as altavista.digital.com. The search engine was the internet’s initial Web index (a website that provides a directory of other web pages or sites.) Since the launch of Google in 1998, Alta Vista’s popularity has waned. The search engine still possesses the largest database across the web, indexing over 140 million web pages. Therefore Alta Vista is seen as a leading provider of search services and technology, though it is not as commercially known as Google.

Alta Vista Creation
Alta Vista was created by the Digital Equipment Corporation. The researchers sought to provide a service to internet users that would make it easier to find files located on the public network. The researchers stored every word of every HTML page within the internet into a fast, searchable index. Louis Monier wrote the crawler for the search engine. A web crawler is a computer program that browses the World Wide Web. Michael Burrows wrote the indexer for Alta Vista. The name “Alta Vista” correlates with the company’s name: Palo Alto.

What Set Alta Vista Ahead of Its Competitors?
When launched, the search engine had innovations which proved more viable than other search engines in Alta Vista’s league. It was run off a fast, multi-threaded crawler that covered multiple web pages. This resulted in a 13 million query per day percentage. Due to the success rate of Alta Vista, it was known as the first full-text database that was searchable across the World Wide Web. Traffic to the search engine echoed the search engine’s success, as on the first day of launching, it received 300,000 hits. Within the next two years the traffic increased up to 80 million hits daily. Alta Vista became one of the best web destinations on the internet and earned millions of Dollars by 1997 in sponsorship revenues.

What the Alta Vista Search Engine is Known For

  • Multilingual Services

Alta Vista provided the first multilingual searches on the internet. Babel Fish is a free translation service on the Alta Vista web page. It automatically translates given texts into desired languages. This translation service not only translates phrases and sentences but entire websites into and from various languages. It is now known as: Yahoo! Babel Fish. Alta Vista is also available in over 25 languages in a number of versions.

  • Growth in the Industry

Alta Vista was the first known search engine to launch image, audio and video search potential.

  • Internet Search Features

Alta Vista offers multimedia searches, translation and specialty searches. Alta Vista is user friendly as it places its emphasis on relevant searches. The search engine allows traffic to filter their searches according to a certain topic or specific related keywords.

Current Stats on Alta Vista

  1. Alta Vista’s Back links: 2047800
  2. Alta Vista’s Traffic Rank: 1,360
  3. Alta Vista’s Page views/User: 1.8
  4. Alta Vista’s Bounce Rate Percentage: 41%
  5. Alta Vista’s Visitors Time on Site: 2.0
  6. Alta Vista’s Search Percentage: 18%
  7. Alta Vista’s Google Page Rank: 9/10

Conclusion
Alta Vista continues to impress by improving the quality and relevancy of information provided for internet users.

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