Internet dinosaur AltaVista becomes extinct

Yahoo! closed down AltaVista search engine - the only first generation search service that lived to this day. This move was announced back in June: the company intends to save resources by redirecting funds to more modern projects.

AltaVista was launched in December of 1995 on the base of the then most powerful computational server - 64-bit DEC Alpha. It was the fastest search system that could handle millions of search queries a day.

AltaVista was created by researchers at Digital Equipment Corporation's Network Systems Laboratory and Western Research Laboratory who were trying to provide services to make finding files on the public network easier. 

Paul Flaherty was responsible for the original idea, and two key participants were Louis Monier, who wrote the crawler, and Michael Burrows, who wrote the indexer. The name AltaVista was chosen in relation to the surroundings of their company at Palo Alto. AltaVista was publicly launched as an internet search engine on December 15, 1995 at altavista.digital.com

 

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