There was a time, long ago, when search engines other than Google prominently roamed the internet. Excite, Infoseek and Lycos (among many others) were all popular destinations for millions of budding internet users. Prior to the eventual conquest of the search engine landscape by Google, one service notably stood above the others in popularity: AltaVista.
Introduced to the public towards the end of 1995, AltaVista was born in a Palo Alto, California research lab during the spring of that year. At that time, Louis Monier and a colleague programmed a means by which every word contained in programmable HTML could be both housed and accessed in index form. Monier implemented multiple-language functionality into the new tool, along with a speedy and scalable ability to "crawl the Web" allowing the tool to be used as a search engine.
Following AltaVista’s release, the web-surfing public quickly recognized the search engine as the preeminent tool available for info search purposes, and as a result AltaVista's usage skyrocketed exponentially in its first two years of existence. Foremost among its innovations was its then-unique ability to search for images, audio and video.
As Chief Technical Officer of AltaVista, Monier did not rest on his laurels; instead, he concocted the internet's first human language translator, Babel Fish.
During the dot-com craze at the turn of the century, AltaVista was sold and resold, and in the wake of that operational turbulence the search engine lost its commanding presence to the rise of Google. For his part, Monier moved on to play roles with eBay and even Google, as well as less-successful start-ups later in the decade.
AltaVista's current owner, Yahoo, only recently announced that the demise of the seminal search engine is nigh, which will bring to an end a definitive chapter of the internet's colorful history.
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