What is Alta Vista?   

Alta Vista was once at the top of search engine lists but its popularity is now a history. It is a web search engine from Yahoo! Inc. The once powerful Alta Vista has an outstanding capability to index more than 145 million pages and it is one of the pioneers in web search category.

Although Alta Vista had taken the backseat in the search engine war, it is still around and regarded as one of the longest running search engine on the Web. Alta Vista was launched in 1995 with the domain name altavista.digital.com after Yahoo! became somewhat of an “internet directory” in 1994. Alta Vista at the time was the internet’s primary website that gives a directory of other sites or web pages. But since Google came into the picture in 1998, its glamour has declined steadily. At any rate, Alta Vista still got the biggest database of web page indexes storing more than 145 million of them across the World Wide Web, and for that reason it is still considered as a solid provider of searched information despite the fact that it is not as popular as Google.

The term "Alta Vista" is associated with the surroundings of their company in Palo Alto, California. The Alta Vista search engine has many features which can be considered as better than other search engines in its category. It runs a high-speed multi-threaded crawler that can cover many web pages in such a short period. An average of 13 million queries a day was processed by the search engine during its heyday. In fact, it obtained more than 300 thousand hits when it went online in 1995. Traffic to its website increased steadily and over the next two years it was averaging 80 million hits on a daily basis. Alta Vista became one of the busiest sites on the internet and received millions of dollars in advertising revenues by 1997.

Alta Vista was known for its multi-lingual services aside from being the first to offer a searchable full-text database. Babel Fish provides the free translation on the search engine’s web page. Texts are automatically translated into the chosen language. Babel Fish also has the ability to translate entire web sites into several languages. The search engine has several versions in as many as 25 languages.

Alta Vista is a user-friendly web search engine that offers multimedia and specialty searches. It considers strong emphasis on relevancy and allows its users to filter searches according to a specific topic or keyword. It was the first search engine to feature audio, video and image searching. However in December 2010, an employee of Yahoo! leaked that the company has plans to shut down the site. So we might soon be asking "What was Altavista?"

We don't really know anything about Search Engines. But we do know about computers. Becasue, we repair computers in London.

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