Pioneering search engine AltaVista opened its service to the public 30 years ago. The original fast and clean internet search destination launched on December 15, 1995, with an enormous (for the time) 16 million pages indexed. Within a year of its establishment, it scaled from a day-one workload of handling 300,000 user queries to tens of millions of requests every day. That’s impressive, given that the service went live ostensibly as a tech demo for DEC’s Alpha server hardware.
AltaVista rises - propelled by powerful hardware
Specifically, AltaVista was launched as an Internet search service powered by a DEC Alpha 8400 Turbolaser system, say some sources. We think credit to that precise server model might be uncertain, due to upgrades over the years and exact specs being lost in the sands of time. The 8400 servers came with up to 14 CPUs running at up to 612 MHz, up to 28GB of RAM, and had 144 PCI slots.
We’ve already sketched out the explosive but almost accidental success that the youthful AltaVista would see. Its architecture, mixing a web crawler dubbed Scooter and a back-end index server called TurboVista, delivered fast and accurate results in the early days of the public adoption of the World Wide Web.
At its inception, AltaVista stood apart from the dominant Internet directories, which had become the default home pages of many. Instead of some kind of curated directory, surfers could tap into the quickly expanding full extent of the Internet thanks to Scooter and TurboVista tirelessly beavering away.
Illustrative of its rapid climb to being a top-tier Internet company, in 1996, AltaVista became the exclusive provider of search results for Yahoo! That’s the year after it launched.
Google arrives with its PageRank algorithm
Describing the rise of Google is another topic in its own right. However, to cut a long story short, its origins are found in Larry Page and Sergey Brin’s BackRub Stanford research project. That’s a good project name, as it almost encapsulates an algorithm that became the jewel in Google’s crown – PageRank.
With PageRank at its heart, Google was founded in 1998 and enjoyed explosive early growth in 1999. People liked the AltaVista-like, simple, clean search UI Google offered, and generally warmed to its weighted, relevant results, served by the PageRank algorithm’s analysis of over 50 million pages in 1999.
In 2000, Google made its business breakthrough, becoming the default search engine for one of the earliest Internet icons, Yahoo!
AltaVista falls - Changes of ownership, and years of decline
If you’ve read all the above, you can see a crossover or collision occur, as AltaVista declines and Google rises. AltaVista sought to fend off Google in the early 2000s with interface and indexing relevance tweaks. However, between 1999 and 2001, Google stole the momentum, knocking the wind out of AltaVista’s sails. An oft-quoted stat puts AltaVista vs Google user share at 17% vs 7% in the year 2000, but the tables were turned very shortly after that.
Famously exerting further downward pressure on AltaVista were a string of acquisitions, where it changed hands from DEC, to Compaq, to CMGI, to Overture Services, and then by acquisition of Overture to Yahoo! Along the way, AltaVista moved away from the clean search results first UI into becoming an all-singing all-dancing portal, helping nail its coffin shut (Hi Google).
Though it was formally shut down by Yahoo! in 2013, nearly 18 years after it first made WWW waves, many of us remember AltaVista fondly. It pioneered the fast and uncluttered search results model users loved, before Google stole its clothes and its thunder. It also introduced genuinely helpful online extras like advanced search operators, translations, and free ISP-agnostic webmail for those who didn’t want Hotmail. All this, before it was killed by mismanagement and becoming bloated.
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