Our History
Good ideas, strong equipment, and a strange fascination with keeping track of email brought AltaVista out of DEC's Research lab and
into the Internet world. In the spring of 1995, three DEC employees (Louis Monier, Joella Paquette and Paul Flaherty)
began talking about Digital's new Alpha 8400 (nicknamed TurboLaser) computers over lunch. TurboLasers promised to run database software a hundred times faster
than the competition. Somewhere between bites of lunch, the idea of using TurboLasers to host a searchable full-text database of the Web was born.
How an email index morphed into a full-text search engine
Let's just say the research lab had an unusual fascination with keeping track of old email. Mike B. (a researcher) had created a very precise
email index to keep track of bulletin board conversations posted over the past 10 years. The index was really good at finding very specific snippets of
information in the volumes of stored email. The researchers used this tool to settle fierce technical debates. This full-text search framework became the
foundation of AltaVista. Our search engine now helps people find specific topics in the gigantic haystack of the World Wide Web.
Where the name came from...
The idea for the name AltaVista originally came from a white board that hadn't been erased properly. The word Alto (of Palo Alto) was placed beside
the word Vista and someone yelled out "How about AltoVista!" and then it became AltaVista, meaning "The view from above."
Since the launch...
Since the launch, other notable inventions to the engine include the first-ever multi-lingual searches on the Internet. As well, we are also proud of Babelfish --
the web's first Internet translation service that translates words, phrases, and entire web sites online in Spanish, French, German,
Portuguese and Italian. Recently, we launched Photo Finder, an image search technology
and Family Filter, a filter that reduces objectionable content from your search results.
Other improvements include phrase detection, spell check, and natural language capabilities.
Visit our pressroom for more news about AltaVista.
