What is AltaVista?
AltaVista was one of the pioneering internet search engines in the early days of the web. Launched in 1995 by Digital Equipment Corporation, it quickly became one of the most popular ways for people to search the nascent World Wide Web.
At the time, most search engines only allowed users to find web pages that matched specific keywords. But AltaVista introduced more advanced features like phrase searching and the use of AND/OR operators to tie keywords together. This allowed users to craft more complex queries and zero in on relevant content more easily.
For several years in the late 1990s, AltaVista dominated the search engine landscape and was the tool of choice for many early adopters and technologists. At its peak, it was performing over 80 million searches per day. While later surpassed by Google, AltaVista pioneered many of the search features we now take for granted.
AltaVista eventually lost ground to more advanced rivals and changed hands several times in the early 2000s before being retired in 2013. But for a while, it was the search engine that ruled the web and introduced many users to the power of search.