One of the first search engines for the World Wide Web. AltaVista was born at Digital Equipment Corp (dec) in 1995, the software being developed as a result of an internal obsession with keeping track of old e-mail. It was acquired by Compaq as part of its 1998 takeover of Digital, but was sold to cgmi, an investment group, in 1999 in a deal that valued the company at $2.7 billion.
AltaVista caused a stir in Europe in early 2000 when it announced the launch of a free isp service, complete with free phone calls, the first company to make such an announcement. Whatever its intentions, the service never materialized, severely damaging the company’s credibility in the process.
Despite its early start in the search engine sector, much of its ground has now been lost to sleeker competitors such as Google. In early 2003, AltaVista was sold to Overture, another web search company, for $140m, representing a loss of over $2 billion in less than four years for its previous owners.
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