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 easier.[3] Paul Flaherty was responsible for the original idea,[4] [5] and two key participants were Louis Monier, who wrote the crawler, and Michael Burrows, who wrote the indexer. The name AltaVista was chosen in relation to the surroundings of their company at Palo Alto. AltaVista was publicly launched as an internet search engine on December 15, 1995 at altavista.digital.com.[6][7]
At launch, the service had two innovations that put it ahead of other search engines available at the time: it used a fast, multi-threaded crawler (Scooter) that could cover many more webpages than were believed to exist at the time, and it had an efficient search-running back-end on advanced hardware. As of 1998, it used 20 multi-processor machines using DEC's 64-bit Alpha processor. Together, the back-end machines had 130 GB of RAM and 500 GB of hard disk space, and received 13 million queries every day.[8] This made AltaVista the first searchable, full-text database of a large part of the World Wide Web.[citation needed] Another distinguishing feature of AltaVista was its minimalistic interface, lost when it became a portal, but regained when it refocused its efforts on its search function.
AltaVista's site was an immediate success. Traffic increased steadily from 300,000 hits on the first day to more than 80 million hits per day two years later. The ability to search the web, and AltaVista's service in particular, became the subject of numerous articles and even some books.[3] AltaVista itself became one of the top destinations on the web, and in 1997 it earned US$50 million in sponsorship revenue.[9]
