The history of the network is the history of its winners. And those of the losers. AltaVista may or may not sound like a technological Pleistocene epoch to the smallest of places, but there was once—actually, not so long ago—when the name described one of the most popular search engines in the world. Internet. So much so that in the mid-1990s, after its rapid growth and before it was just two years old, it registered nearly 80 million visits per day.

AltaVista is a story of what it is. It’s like that of many other big companies that have gone from being heroes to simple footnotes in the web’s unstable history, but also – and that’s one of its quirks – about what it could be. ironies of historyIn the late 1990s, its executives missed the opportunity to transform the company into the huge empire that Google is today. But this goes too far.

Whether you’re from the 80’s, debuted in the world of search engines, or the name sounds Mandarin to you, it’s interesting to remember what AltaVista is and what its history is: how it went from around 300,000 visits in its early days just two years later to 80 million and only a few dozen daily searches were made when its owner decided to shelve it in 2013.

From the hero, at the bottom of the page

Its origins date back about thirty years, December 15, 1995more precisely when it was published as a research project of the Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) Network Systems Laboratory. Its founder, Paul Flaherty, is said to have decided to name it AltaVista because of its place of origin in Palo Alto. What is known is that its creators wanted a search engine for pages and files on the public web. And they didn’t do anything bad in the effort. As he will explain later New York Times Allan L. Jennings, one of the project’s thought leaders, had access to up to 30 million pages.

With its simple and easy-to-use interface, numerous indexed sites, and powerful hardware, its appeal soon caught the attention of Internet users of the 90s. Yes, at the beginning — with the domain altavista.digita. com—received 300,000 daily visits, approaching 80 million a few years later. The progress in its first year is pretty significant: from several accounts, tens of thousands of requests per day to over 2.5 million.

The service was promising enough to catch the attention of Yahoo!, with which it reached an agreement in 1996. Purpose: Jerry Yang and David Filo to develop the search engine using the AltaVista engine.

During the following years his diary will be complicated but with business moves that affect his property and therefore his approach. Perhaps what actually happened was in 1998, when Compaq, which bought the DEC in June, decided to replace it without much purpose to make it look like a service portal that didn’t help strengthen its position against the competition.

The next big move was Yahoo! took over the reins of himself and another popular search engine, Alltheweb. In the following years, AltaVista operated as a standalone service and Yahoo! Until I saw how the company pulled its search engine back in 2011.

it was the first episode of a series death announced. Before long, in 2013 Yahoo! announced the shutdown of the once successful search engine. He had passed through a long period of decline from his glory years that cornered him with a small market share: At the time of his death that same summer, his pageview volume was light years away from what was recorded. by Google.

By then Google already had 66.5% of searches, followed by Bing (17.3%) and Yahoo! (% eleven). It’s a sad ending for the search engine that many of the Internet users of the late ’90s and early 2000s grew up with, and an ironic epitaph for the company that, if true, could become what Google is today: Its break was made in 1998 by two Stanford students, Sergey Brin. and Larry Page knocked on AltaVista’s door seeking funding to develop Page Rank ideas.

To Flaherty, the offer didn’t seem entirely unreasonable, and the amount Larry Page and Sergey Brin wanted was ridiculous; That’s what he was saying, of course, from the perspective of the years and given that Google has finally become a business venture. The youngsters finally got on board, but the Page Rank thing did not convince the AltaVista owners. And the train passed.

It is already known: the chronicle of the network is the chronicle of its sweet moments. And those that leave a bitter taste in the mouth. “What would have happened if…?”

Images: Wikipedia

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