Yahoo! Inc. (2017–present) AltaVista was a web search engine established in 1995. It became one of the most-used early search engines, but lost ground to Google and was purchased by Yahoo! in 2003, which retained the brand, but based all AltaVista searches on its own search engine.

AltaVista was a groundbreaking search engine created by Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) in 1995. It was one of the earliest and most popular keyword-based search tools on the World Wide Web in the mid-90s and is widely considered to be the first major search engine in history.

Another distinguishing feature of AltaVista was its minimalistic interface, which was lost when it became a Web portal, but regained when it refocused its efforts on its search function. It also allowed the user to limit search results from a domain, reducing the likelihood of multiple results from the same source.

AltaVista was a search engine as well as a web portal that allowed users to browse the world wide web as well as UseNet. It initially started out as a crawler-based search engine that utilized its own web index to crawl more than 20 million pages. Many search engines at the time were only able to index around one to two million web pages.