5:10 AM
Rx8 IIUM
by Ahmad Fawwazuddin
AltaVista is a web search engine owned by Yahoo!. AltaVista was once one of the most popular search engines but its popularity has waned with the rise of Google.
It used a fast, multi-threaded crawler (Scooter) which could cover many more Web pages than were believed to exist at the time and an efficient search running back-end on advanced hardware. As of 1998, it used 20 multi-processor machines using DEC's 64-bit Alpha processor. Together, the back-end machines had 130 GB of RAM and 500 GB of hard disk space, and received 13 million queries per day. This made AltaVista the first searchable, full-text database of a large part of the World Wide Web. The distinguishing feature of AltaVista was its minimalistic interface compared with other search engines of the time; a feature which was lost when it became a portal, but was regained when it refocused its efforts on its search function.
AltaVista's site was an immediate success. Traffic increased steadily from 300,000 hits on the first day to more than 80 million hits a day two years later. The ability to search the web, and AltaVista's service in particular, became the subject of numerous articles and even some books. AltaVista itself became one of the top destinations on the web, and by 1997 would earn US$50 million in sponsorship revenue.
Furthermore, AltaVista provides a free translation service, branded Babel Fish, which automatically translates text between several languages. In May 2008, this service was renamed Yahoo! Babel Fish, after the parent company.
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