What is the Altavista Search Engine?

AltaVista was a search engine launched in December 1995 and closed in 2013. Developed by Digital Equipment Corporation, it was the leading search engine for years before Google and its competitors arrived.

Louis Monier (creator of the indexing robot) and Michael Burrows (indexer) are the main developers and creators of Altavista. It is the first search engine to index a large volume of web pages so quickly, which explains its great popularity among Internet users worldwide. This large population thus benefited from the first multilingual search engine to search for a site.

AltaVista, which means “High View” in Spanish, received up to 13 million daily hits. Users could search for websites, images, files, and videos.

History of the Altavista search engine?

• 1995: creation of AltaVista
• 1998: AltaVista records 13 million searches per day
• 1998: Compaq acquires AltaVista to turn it into a portal
• 1999: CMGI (investment company) buys a share of the capital
• 2000s: AltaVista is overtaken by the young search engine Google
• 2004: Yahoo! buy AltaVista
• 2010: Yahoo! refocuses its activities and invests less in the Search sector
• 2013: Yahoo! shuts down AltaVista service completely