AltaVista

Search, before Google

Shut down
19902026

AltaVista was the definitive search engine of the late 1990s, launched by Digital Equipment Corporation in December 1995 with a full-text index of unprecedented scale. Portal ambitions, repeated ownership changes and Google's rise reduced it to a relic; Yahoo shut it down on 8 July 2013.

Timeline [edit]

  1. 1995
  2. 15 December 1995 Launch
    AltaVista launches

    DEC's full-text index redefines web search.

  3. 1997
  4. 9 December 1997 Feature
    Babel Fish launches

    The web's first free translation service.

  5. 1998
  6. 1998 Peak
    The web's dominant search engine

    Tens of millions of queries a day at its late-90s height.

  7. 11 June 1998 Acquisition
    Compaq acquires DEC

    AltaVista becomes a portal project inside a PC company.

  8. 1999
  9. 18 August 1999 Acquisition
    CMGI takes majority control

    A bubble-era stock deal; the IPO never happens.

  10. 2003
  11. 18 February 2003 Acquisition
    Overture buys AltaVista

    About $140 million for the fallen giant.

  12. 7 October 2003 Acquisition
    Yahoo acquires Overture

    AltaVista becomes Yahoo plumbing.

  13. 2013
  14. 28 June 2013 Shutdown announced
    Yahoo announces the closure

    One line in a product-cull blog post.

  15. 8 July 2013 Shutdown
    AltaVista shuts down

    The domain redirects to Yahoo Search.

The site through time

Browse altavista.com as it was, via the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine:

1995 1998 2001 2004 2007 2010 2013 Full archive →

Ownership [edit]

Digital Equipment Corporation 1995–1998 Founded Built to showcase Alpha servers
Compaq 1998–1999 Acquisition, via the $9.6B DEC acquisition Portal redesign era
CMGI 1999–2003 Acquisition, majority stake, ~$2.3B in stock at announcement Dot-com crash kills the IPO
Overture Services 2003–2003 Acquisition, $140M
Yahoo 2003–2013 Acquisition, via the $1.63B Overture acquisition Ran it as a shell until 2013

Why it shut down [edit]

Official line: Yahoo announced in June 2013 that AltaVista would close on 8 July 2013 as part of a product cull; the domain now redirects to Yahoo Search.

Our analysis: The best search engine of the 90s lost to a better algorithm and its own owners: DEC treated it as a hardware demo, Compaq as a portal, CMGI as a dot-com asset. By the time it refocused on search, Google had taken the users and never gave them back.

History [edit]

The fast index

AltaVista launched on 15 December 1995 as a showcase for DEC's Alpha servers, and it was a revelation: a full-text index of tens of millions of pages, returning results in under a second, with advanced query syntax that felt like magic in 1996. Traffic went from 300,000 hits on launch day to tens of millions per day within two years. For most of the late 90s, "search the web" meant AltaVista.

It also shipped genuine firsts, including Babel Fish in 1997, the web's first free machine translation service.

Death by portal

Then came the ownership carousel: Compaq swallowed DEC in 1998 and redesigned AltaVista into a Yahoo-style portal (news! shopping! email!) just as a Stanford startup named Google proved that users wanted the opposite: a clean box that found things. CMGI bought a majority stake at the bubble's peak for stock once valued in the billions; the planned IPO died with the crash. Overture picked up the remains for about $140 million in 2003, Yahoo bought Overture months later, and AltaVista spent a decade as a Yahoo-powered ghost. In June 2013 Yahoo listed it among products being closed; on 8 July 2013 altavista.com became a redirect to Yahoo Search.

Similar projects

ICQ The messenger that gave you a number 1996–2024 MySpace A place for friends 2003–now Winamp It really whips the llama's ass 1997–2013 GeoCities Your neighborhood on the early web 1994–2009 Netscape Navigator The browser that opened the web 1994–2008 RealPlayer Buffering… buffering… 1995–now

Sources [edit]

  1. Yahoo shuts down internet relic AltaVista CBC News 8 July 2013 [archived]
  2. Yahoo! to close AltaVista The Register 29 June 2013 [archived]

Last verified: 11 August 2026. Spotted an error? Suggest an edit (corrections with sources are reviewed and applied).