For as long as I can remember, my home page has been about:blank. But for a good chunk of the 1990s, I would have done well to set it to altavista.digital.com. Here’s what happened to Altavista, the search engine that went independent June 29, 1999.
Most people remember Altavista as the thing people used before Google, if they remember it at all. But I remember it as the first great search engine, because I’ve done my best to forget what search was like before Altavista came along. So I was a little sad to see Yahoo shut down what was left of the first great search engine July 8, 2013.
Why Altavista mattered
In 1994-95, a common question to ask was what search engine people used. The reason was because there was no search engine that was clearly better than the rest. I bounced between Webcrawler, Lycos, Excite, and Hotbot. I typically had to use more than one of them to find what I was looking for. And that was the thing: Sometimes I never did find it.
Altavista’s origin story sounds like a huge shadow IT project. Digital Equipment Corporation had this fantastic CPU called the Alpha that was worlds better than anything else out there. But they had no way to test its limits. They needed a huge problem to throw at it so they could find its breaking point, so they thought to try indexing the entire Internet with it. So they rigged something up, and to their surprise, the Alpha just chewed through the problem and kept going.
So they decided to keep Altavista going as a way to promote the Alpha. The mistake was that they didn’t make it clear enough that it was powered by the Alpha. They forgot to read that page in Intel’s marketing book. That’s one reason why the PC you’re using today has an Intel processor in it instead of an Alpha.
As a marketing project, Altavista failed. But it succeeded as the best search engine for its day. It was faster than all the rest, and it produced more results than all the rest. Today we take 15 pages of search results for granted, but Altavista was the first engine to produce those kinds of results.
Altavista launched December 15, 1995. Its use spread like wildfire, passed mostly by word of mouth. Its success was practically an accident.
Why Google beat Altavista
And I’ll tell you this: When Google launched, I was skeptical. Could this upstart really be faster than Altavista?
Where Google won, though, was by applying intelligence to search in addition to brute force. With Altavista, the best search result could just as easily be on page 15 as on page 1. Google tried its best to make sure the search results on page 1 were more likely to be what you were looking for than on page 2. Or page 15. Ranking search results by the number of incoming links was one of those ideas that seems obvious now. But in 1997-98 it was revolutionary. Google didn’t have to be as fast as Altavista. I think it was a pretty close race. But it didn’t matter because most of the time it got you the result you wanted much faster.
The other problem, arguably, was that while Google concentrated just on search and being fast, Altavista tried to become a portal. But we didn’t need another Yahoo. We needed fast and accurate search, which was what Google delivered, for a time.
Altavista specs
In its heyday Altavista’s cluster of servers had 130 GB of RAM, 500 GB of storage, and about 50 CPU cores among them, running at a speed of around 433 MHz. Today, we’d call that a high-end gaming rig with way too little storage.
But trust me: In 1995, that was a mind-blowing amount of computing power. If you weren’t a large computer company or a nation-state, you didn’t have it. The idea of being able to have Altavista-level power on your desk feels like living in the future for anyone who used Altavista at the time.
What happened to Altavista
Compaq bought DEC in 1998, mostly to get its services division. Compaq didn’t care much about the rest of DEC, although Altavista certainly seemed to interest Compaq more than the CPU technology that powered it. But Altavista interested Compaq more as a business to spin off to make its investors happy than anything else.
That spinoff happened June 29, 1999, when Compaq sold 83% of Altavista to venture capital firm CMGI for $2.3 billion, retaining a 17% minority stake.
But that value didn’t last. Google had launched in 1998 and soon did to Altavista what it had done to everyone else. Google had been willing to sell to Altavista, but it had no budget for acquisitions, one of the great missed opportunities in Internet history.
Not much good happened after that spinoff. Altavista got passed around like a hot potato to companies who briefly thought it would be a good idea to try to compete with the nascent Google juggernaut. Among them was Yahoo, who absorbed its technology into its own search engine as part of its own ill-fated attempt to compete with Google.
On July 8, 2013, Altavista shut down. There’s no money to be made off people like me typing altavista.digital.com or altavista.com into a web browser to see if the domain is still live before we scurry off to something else. I still thought enough of it to ensure Altavista had this blog in its index in 2001, but it was pretty clear even then that competing with Google was a lost cause.
David Farquhar is a computer security professional, entrepreneur, and author. He has written professionally about computers since 1991, so he was writing about retro computers when they were still new. He has been working in IT professionally since 1994 and has specialized in vulnerability management since 2013. He holds Security+ and CISSP certifications. Today he blogs five times a week, mostly about retro computers and retro gaming covering the time period from 1975 to 2000.
RIP AltaVista.
I still miss the simple Boolean search functions it had, and which Google has done their best to eliminate.