From “#1 on the Web”
to “© 2013 Yahoo!”

The December 1996 capture of www.altavista.digital.com is mostly white. A painted mountain masthead sits on top, with buttons for Advanced and Simple queries, a free download and Help. Under it is one line of controls, Search the Web and Display the Results in Standard Form, with both the Web and the form as drop-down menus. The browser tab reads AltaVista Search: Main Page.

The page told you how big it was. AltaVista gives you access to the largest Web index: 30 million pages found on 275,600 servers, and four million articles from 14,000 Usenet news groups. It is accessed over 23 million times per weekday. Digital Equipment Corporation had launched it in 1995 to show off its own technology, and the small print still says what it ran on: Digital UNIX, Digital Alpha and AltaVista Search software.^[1][2]

The search tip is pure 1996: Want to find images of the latest comet? Then try: Hyakutake image:*. A box called AltaVista Today sells AltaVista Search My Computer PX, the same search for your private data, For only $29.95.

The partner row has 12 names. Yahoo comes first, then CNET’s Search.com, InfoSpace’s Directories, BlueWindow and eight more.

In April 1997 the same page has new numbers. The index is 31 million pages found on 627,000 servers, and the line under it says AltaVista is accessed over 31 million times per weekday. The partner row has grown to 19 names, with Yahoo still first.

The tip now points to Usenet: Looking for recipes? Bargains? Try the newsgroups. AltaVista Today has a job ad, Hot job openings: join AltaVista!, and a game: DILBERT: Are you smarter than your boss? Prove it! The footer still says Copyright © 1996 Digital Equipment Corporation.

In May 1998 the search engine still lived at altavista.digital.com. According to CNET, that was not by choice. A small company, AltaVista Technology, had registered altavista.com in 1994.

People who typed the obvious address landed on that company’s site, where, as CNET put it, they can have their photos digitized and put online, but they can’t search.

On August 11, 1998, CNET reported that Compaq, which ran AltaVista by then, had announced a deal transferring the company’s trademark and domain names. The price was not disclosed; $3.3 million was widely reported.^[1]

The May page looks busier than 1997. A green Our Sponsors box has a menu of download categories, from Games to Win95, and a small form headed Is your domain name available? with a Check It! button. A What’s New panel has Is there a 'silver bullet' for Y2K headaches? and Desperately Seeking Susan? Find her here - AltaVista People Search. The language menu next to the search box lists 25 languages in its code, from Chinese to Swedish.

Gaspari and Hutchins date the launch of AltaVista’s free translation page, Babel Fish, to December 9, 1997, as a partnership with the translation company Systran.^[11] Five visits to it come later in this story.

By May 1999 the page is at altavista.com, and the masthead says The most powerful and useful guide to the Net. A yellow band holds the search box and an invitation: Ask AltaVista™ a question. The example under it is Where can I download mp3 files for instrumental music?

Below are 13 directory categories, news by ABCNEWS.com, Get Internet Explorer 5 and four sponsor boxes, one of them webpersonals.com Find your mate! A headline in AltaVista Highlights reads AltaVista Adds Relevant Paid Links. The footer carries the COMPAQ name.

One of AltaVista’s TV commercials had Pamela Anderson Lee in it: after a disaster in Hollywood, a technogeek uses AltaVista to find out she is in trouble, and saves her. AP described it in October 1999, when AltaVista relaunched as a portal with shopping, finance, entertainment and live traffic pictures, and counted more than 600 staff, up from 80 a year earlier.^[3]

The MP3 example on the May page was also a sore point. In November 1999 WIRED ran a search for MP3 pages limited to October 10 to November 1 and got zero results; the same kind of search on one day in September had found close to four thousand. AltaVista was moving to a new index at the time.^[4]

The June 2000 capture is the portal at full size. The top bar reads Search Live! Shopping Raging Bull Free Internet Access Email. The search box has tabs for Images, MP3/Audio and Video, and three columns run below it: Breaking News, AltaVista Directory: The Web’s Largest and Shopping Rewards, where you could Win a Mercedes!, an Autobahn Experience - complete with SLK230 and trip to Germany.

The small print is a snapshot of June 2000. A box of top discussion-group searches puts 1. MP3 first, ahead of games and JavaScript. What’s On AltaVista Now has Napster: Injunction filed to shut down next to the Napster logo. Registering earned 1500 pts in AltaVista Rewards.

Free Internet Access in the top bar was a real dial-up service, and it didn’t last.

In June 2001 the browser tab reads AltaVista - The Search Company, and the mountain is back beside a teal and navy wordmark. The page is still a portal: price comparisons, uBid auctions, 14 directory sections, AltaVista sites in 21 countries, and tools such as Weight Calculator and Find A Date. A small Babel Fish icon stands next to Translate. The footer says A CMGI Company.

That year, by the BBC’s account, Google overtook AltaVista in the number of searches.^[10] In June 2002 the yellow header has tabs for Web, Image, Audio, Video, Directory and News, and a Marketplace column lists Free Casino Cash and Gamble Online next to insurance quotes and MCSE training. AltaVista had announced that its free AltaVista.com email for about 200,000 U.S. customers would end on March 31, 2002; AltaVista.net and international accounts were not affected.^[7] CNET, citing Nielsen//NetRatings, put AltaVista at about 15.6 million monthly visitors in October 2000 and about 5.6 million unique visitors in September 2002.^[8]

In November 2002 AltaVista launched a simpler front page, and CNET listed what it was dropping: its mountain logo, its signature yellow coloring and its tag line: The Search Company.^[8] The June 2003 capture shows the result. A red av symbol sits over a navy lowercase altavista, the search panel is pale blue, and next to the FIND button it says More Precision.

The CEO, Jim Barnett, was blunt about the years before: The company tried to become a portal too late in the game, and lost focus.^[9]

CNET reported that the relaunch would bring an ad-free home page, keeping only a small branded ad.^[8] There are no banners in this capture, but a Marketplace column on the right lists Poker, Online Gambling, MP3 Downloads and Adult Education. Lower down, a cartoon fish asks Say That Again? and answers: Babel Fish translates text & Web pages in 10 languages. In 2003 AltaVista was sold to Overture, and Yahoo bought Overture the same year.^[10]

In our seven June captures from 2004 to 2010 the altavista.com homepage barely moves. Each has a centered blue search panel: a row of tabs, a search field, a FIND button and one row of radio buttons, SEARCH: Worldwide or Select a country and RESULTS IN: All languages English. The copyright line under it names the new owner’s company: © 2004 Overture Services, Inc.

The changes are in the links. The Translate link of 2004 and 2005 is called Babel Fish Translation in the June 2006 capture, Answers appears in June 2007, and by June 2009 the MP3/Audio and Video tabs are gone, leaving Web, Images and News. The copyright year kept pace until 2007 and then stopped.

Babel Fish lived at babelfish.altavista.com, and in our five visits its menu expands from 10 translation directions in December 1998 to 36 in January 2005. It took its name from the translating fish in Douglas Adams’s The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, and the March 2000 page carries a small h2g2.com badge.^[14]

In December 1998 it is a yellow box: To translate, type plain text or the address (URL) of a Web page here. Its drop-down menu’s code lists 10 directions, English to and from French, German, Italian, Portuguese and Spanish, the ten combinations Gaspari and Hutchins describe for the launch.^[11] The footer says ©1995-98 Digital Equipment Corporation.

By January 2002 the box is grey, takes up to 150 words, and its menu’s code lists 19 directions, now with Chinese, Japanese, Korean and Russian. In January 2005 it is a blue panel called Babel Fish Translation whose menu code lists 36 directions involving 12 languages, Dutch and Greek among them, and a sidebar of Global Services links: calling cards, a language school, study abroad.

The January 2008 capture keeps the blue panel, with a new tip, You can now follow links on translated web pages., without the 150-word note and the sidebar’s translation tools and SYSTRAN ad, and with a footer that says © 2006 Overture Services, Inc. By 2012 the service was called Yahoo! Babel Fish. On May 30, 2012, Microsoft’s translator blog wrote, We are pleased to welcome Yahoo! Babel Fish users to the Bing Translator family.^[12]

In June 2011 the AltaVista homepage is a Yahoo search page in all but the logo. The browser tab reads Yahoo! Search - Web Search, a small altavista logo sits over a long search field with a yellow Search button, and the footer says © 2011 Yahoo! The tabs are Web, Images, Video, Local, Shopping, News and More.

The June 2012 capture adds an Apps tab. The last capture in this story is from July 1, 2013, a week before the end. Apps is gone again, and the footer says © 2013 Yahoo! On July 8, 2013, Yahoo shut AltaVista down, and altavista.com began sending visitors to Yahoo.^[13]

1996 · #1 on the Web1996 · #12013 · © Yahoo!2013 · Yahoo!

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The December 1996 page put Yahoo first in its row of Sites Powered By AltaVista. By July 2013 the AltaVista page was the one running on Yahoo, and #1 on the Web had become a small logo over Yahoo’s search box.