The word "AltaVista" is formed from the words for "high view" or "upper view" in Spanish (alta + vista); thus, it colloquially translates to "overview". See more

AltaVista was the first searchable, full-text database on the World Wide Web with a simple interface.
As of 1998, it used 20 See more

AltaVista provided Babel Fish, a Web-based machine translation application that translated text or webpages from one of several languages into another. It was later superseded by … See more

On June 28, 2013, Yahoo! announced on its Tumblr page that AltaVista would shut down on July 8, 2013; since that date, visits to AltaVista's home page redirect to Yahoo!'s main page. See more

AltaVista was created by researchers at Digital Equipment Corporation's Network Systems Laboratory and Western Research Laboratory who were trying to provide services to … See more

In 1996, AltaVista became the exclusive provider of search results for Yahoo!. In 1998, Digital was sold to Compaq, and in 1999, Compaq … See more

To fight against an increasing number of malicious internet bots, AltaVista implemented the first practical CAPTCHA schemes to protect against fraudulent account registrations. They implemented it specifically to prevent bots from adding URLs See more