What is AltaVista?
AltaVista was a search engine established in 1995, which quickly became one of the largest and most widely used search engines in both Denmark and Norway.
The reason for this was that AltaVista was one of the first robot-based search engines, meaning they not only used the technology themselves but also sold it to other websites.
AltaVista was therefore a leader of its time, and was the first search engine to have an index of around 20 million websites, while competitors at the same time (1995) only had around 2 million. AltaVista thus had 10x the index of its competitors.
Who invented AltaVista?
Paul Flaherty, an American computer specialist, came up with the original idea for AltaVista together with Louis Monier and Michael Burrows.
AltaVista search engine today
AltaVista was indeed one of the most dominant and widely used search engines from 1995 until 2000, but as competition intensified and other search engines grew, AltaVista was sold to Yahoo in 2003.
Yahoo tried for many years to keep the search engine, AltaVista, running separately but ultimately chose to shut down AltaVista entirely in 2013.
To this day, AltaVista is in a sense part of the Yahoo search engine: https://search.yahoo.com/
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