I decided to write about Altavista after being contacted by a Failbeta reader, Oliver. In reality, as I mentioned to him, perhaps it is necessary to talk about various search engines which have fallen by the wayside due to the success of the absolute leader, Google. We’ll leave that for later articles. Let’s take a look at the history of this search engine, which was once the largest and most used in the world.

Altavista was created by Louis Monier and Michael Burrows of the company Digital in December 1995. Monier would later work for Google until August 2007, when he left to create the new search engine Cuil. As for Burrows, he later worked for Microsoft and currently works for Google. Google’s success caused an amazing influx of talent from its competitors.

Altavista was hugely successful from the start. It went from receiving 300,000 hits on its first days to 80 million hits a day two years later. In 1996 it became the search provider for Yahoo! and two years later, in 1998, it was bought by Compaq. It was then later bought by Overture in 2003, and this company was in turn bought by Yahoo!. Remarkable.

If we look back a few years we can see what in my opinion was a missed opportunity for various search engines of the time. Before there was a Google Inc. and the Google search engine, when it was only a project of two university students at Stanford, Altavista (and other search engines) rejected the offer of Larry Page and Sergey Brin to provide searches through the use of a revolutionary technology they had developed, PageRank.

It was in March 1998, when Altavista had a 54% share of the world’s searches, that Page and Brin met with Paul Flaherty (architect of Altavista) at a Palo Alto restaurant to offer him access to their new technology for one million dollars. Even though it recognized the superior quality of their new technology, Altavista’s policy of not depending on third parties caused them to reject the offer. The reasons for rejecting it may have seemed logical at the time, and businesses take so many turns that today we could be talking about Altavista as the world’s top search engine and Page and Brin as Altavista employees.

Here we are speaking of Altavista as a search engine. but Altavista has other services with which it has also had problems. This is the case of the flat-rate Internet access the company announced, which was never launched in the UK and which in August 2000 led to the resignation of its general manager.

In 2000, the company’s president (Rod Schorock) left his position, apparently to spend time with his family. What we do know is that the company then acknowledged that the search engine’s hits were plummeting and that the service was not even available. In 2001, it dropped from 14 to 50 in the ranking of most visited websites and laid off 340 workers.

And what has happened to Altavista today? Today’s reality is quite different: the search engine only receives some 250,000 hits a day and uses the search engine of Yahoo!, the same company that, as I told you, once used the Altavista search engine. Ironic.