Detail map of Palo Alto, California, United States

Overview map of Palo Alto, California, United States

The Web Search Engine Altavista is Launched

12/15/1995 to 7/8/2013

"Screenshot of the AltaVista search engine in its "Web portal" time, October 1999, as appearing in the then-current Netscape Web browser version (4.x). Intended to illustrate the paragraph covering AltaVista's "Web portal" attempt in AltaVista."

On December 15, 1995 web search engine Altavista was launched from Palo Alto, California. It received 300,000 hits on its first day, and became one of the most popular search engines until it was eclipsed by Google. In 2003 it was purchased by Yahoo!, which retained the brand but based all AltaVista searches on its own search engine. On July 8, 2013 Yahoo shut down Altavista, and the domain redirects to Yahoo!'s own search site.

Timeline Themes

Indexing & Searching Information