The word "AltaVista" is formed from the words for "high view" or "upper view" in Spanish (alta + vista); thus, it colloquially … 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 make finding files on the public network ea… See more

AltaVista was the first searchable, full-text database on the World Wide Web with a simple interface. Another distinguishing feature of AltaVista was its minimalistic interface, which was lost when it became a Web portal, … See more

As of 1998, AltaVista is based on weighted boolean search. There are two major search modes: simple querying and advanced querying.
A "simple query" looks like `word1 word2 "phrase" -w… 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 redesigned AltaVista as a Web portal, hoping to compete with Yahoo!. Under CE… 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 It was later superseded by Yahoo! Babel Fish in May 2008 and n… See more