Vendor lineage
AltaVista
Built to stress-test a processor, it became the best search engine on the web - and was then turned into a portal.
AltaVista was not conceived as a search engine. DEC's Alpha 64-bit machines were so fast that the standard benchmarks of the day could not stress them, and a researcher on vacation sketched a way to generate a workload chaotic enough to try: point a crawler at the whole World Wide Web.
Paul Flaherty had the idea. Louis Monier wrote the crawler - Scooter - and Michael Burrows wrote the indexer, at DEC's Network Systems Laboratory and Western Research Laboratory in Palo Alto. It launched on 15 December 1995 at altavista.digital.com with an index of sixteen million documents, an enormous number at the time, offering full-text search with Boolean operators and natural-language queries when the alternative was a hand-maintained directory.
It worked immediately. By 1996 it was the exclusive search provider to Yahoo, which had itself begun as a directory. AltaVista also shipped Babel Fish, the web's first machine-translation service, named for the fish in Douglas Adams.
Then ownership changed hands four times in five years. Compaq acquired DEC in 1998 for $9.6B, the largest technology takeover to that point, and reportedly some Compaq executives did not know AltaVista existed. Compaq paid a further $3.3M for the altavista.com domain, which someone else had registered in 1994. Under a new chief executive the search engine was rebuilt as a portal - shopping, free email, news - to compete with Yahoo, which meant competing on everything except the thing it was best at.
In June 1999 Compaq sold 83% to CMGI for around $2.3B in stock. The planned IPO was cancelled when the bubble burst in 2000. AltaVista shed the portal features and refocused on search quality by 2002, which was good work arriving late: Google had taken the market. In February 2003 Overture bought it for $140M - roughly six percent of the CMGI valuation three years earlier - and Yahoo acquired Overture five months later.
By 2004 Scooter and the original ranking engine were switched off and AltaVista became a front end for Yahoo's results. It was formally shut down on 8 July 2013. The technology was not what failed; the decision to stop being a search engine was.