AltaVista is a web search engine owned by Yahoo!. AltaVista was once one of the most popular search engines but its popularity declined with the rise of Google. In 2010, Yahoo! announced that it plans to discontinue the site.
Origins
AltaVista was created by researchers at Digital Equipment Corporation's Western Research Laboratory who were trying to provide services to make finding files on the public network easier. Although there is some dispute about who was responsible for the original idea, two key participants were Louis Monier, who wrote the crawler, and Michael Burrows, who w...