Altavista Co - History, Altavista Sold To Cmgi Inc. In 1999, New Initiatives To Increase Traffic In 2000

AltaVista—the name means "the view from above"—is a Web portal that offers Web pages, shopping, news, live audio and video, and community resources including e-mail. The site is run by Alta-Vista Co., a majority-owned operating company of Palo Alto, California-based CMGI Inc. AltaVista is perhaps best known for its search technology. It provided the first full-text search service in the world when it was created in 1995 at the Palo Alto research laboratory of Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC). DEC's engineers devised a plan to store every word of every page on the entire Internet in a searchable index, and then utilize DEC's new Alpha 8400 computers to extract relevant information from this body of knowledge.

AltaVista has been awarded more search-related patents than any other company. The 2001 version of AltaVista Search is available in 25 languages with eight distinct search dimensions. Other innovations credited to AltaVista include the first-ever multilingual search capacity on the Internet and the first search technology to support Chinese, Japanese, and Korean languages. AltaVista created Babel Fish, the first machine translation service on the Web. AltaVista also created advanced and multimedia search centers that let users search the Web for photos, videos, and music through its index of more than 30 million multimedia objects.