AltaVista — the tale of the first mover who failed
It’s not enough to be the first mover, at least that’s what AltaVista, the first search engine taught us. In fact, many search engines today use techniques that AltaVista used.
Pain-points of existing search engines
Most search engines prior to AltaVista functioned by user submissions and manual indexing. The disadvantage of manual indexing was that they had a short lifespan. Once the web began to grow with various sites, it became impossible to cover every site manually.
Also search engines ended up showing different results because of the sites they covered and the order in which they were ranked. Moreover these search engines couldn’t find new websites.
There was definitely opportunity for a search engine to find new websites through an automated process.
The birth of AltaVista
AltaVista was launched in 1995 by Digital Equipment Corporation. Interestingly Digital was a manufacturer of supercomputers and the search engine, AltaVista was only a test case for the capabilities of a supercomputer.
AltaVista is essentially an amalgamation of a web crawler tool (known as Scooter, created by Louis Monier), an indexer (written by Michael Burrows) and the conception of the very idea by Paul Flaherty. After a Beta testing by the employees, the search engine was launched on December 15th 1995. On its launch, the site was visited by 300,000 users. And 2 years later in 1997, the site had nearly 80 million visitors everyday.
Features of AltaVista
AltaVista was able to index nearly 10 times the number of pages compared to other search engines. AltaVista was also capable of carrying out specific targeted searches. And it was provided free to the public because it was a marketing tool for the capabilities of their supercomputer.
- It was the first search engine that enabled Natural Language Processing (NLP). So, searching for “Who is the President of the USA” would yield results only for ‘president’ and ‘USA’, not for filler words like ‘who’, ‘is’, ‘the’, ‘of’, etc. Moreover it also allowed boolean operators like ‘AND’, ‘OR’.
- It was also able to fill the customer’s pain points by creating a complete index of the web and indexing pages, thus making it the first full text database of the web.
- The user could also control the number of results that originated from a particular domain.
- It was also the first search engine which allowed the user to search for images and videos.
- It was the stepping stone for Google Translator. It allowed searches in multiple languages and could also translate web pages.
The fall of AltaVista
In 1996, AltaVista was partnering with Yahoo, supplementing the Yahoo search queries. This was followed by Digital’s acquisition by rival Compaq in 1998 for US$ 3.3 Million. Compaq was to be blamed for the first poor decision of trying to beat Yahoo’s search engine by diversifying the features of AltaVista and turning it into a cluttered complex page.
AltaVista lost the very simplistic edge it had with respect to its competitors, and users soon decided to switch to a new simplistic search engine ‘Google’ which would go on to make history.
From 1999 to 2003, AltaVista changed ownership twice by Lycos and Overture before finally being acquired by Yahoo in 2003, which triggered the demise of AltaVista. All the remarkable technology of AltaVista was merged into Yahoo in 2011, and Yahoo closed down AltaVista in 2013.
Conclusion
AltaVista was never taken seriously as a search engine by Digital; it was more of a marketing tool for their supercomputer, the first blunder. Digital never realized the potential opportunity in web search.
By the time it was realized as a serious search engine contender, it was transformed into a complex portal, which was not preferred by users. Its financial turmoils were only adding oil to the fire. And soon it was too late, and once Google got its start, there was no stopping it.
This again goes to show how amazing technology at its finest couldn’t gain ground due to poor strategic decisions.
