AltaVista
The search engine everyone used before Google — fast, powerful, and the first with a full-text, boolean-searchable index of the web. It also gave the world Babel Fish, the free page-translator named after the fish from The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.
AltaVista publicly launched on December 15, 1995, built by researchers at Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) in Palo Alto: Paul Flaherty conceived the idea, Louis Monier programmed the web crawler (nicknamed Scooter), and Michael Burrows wrote the indexer. It was the first full-text, boolean-searchable index of the World Wide Web, and it was startlingly fast for its moment.
Traffic exploded from 300,000 hits on its first day to more than 80 million hits a day by 1997. That same year it launched Babel Fish, a web-based machine-translation tool that would translate text or whole pages — clumsy, frequently hilarious, and genuinely magical in 1997. As late as 2000, AltaVista was still used by 17.7% of internet users while Google search sat at just 7%.
Then came the ownership merry-go-round that doomed it. Compaq acquired DEC — and AltaVista with it — in January 1998 for $9.6 billion, then sold 83% of AltaVista to CMGI in June 1999. Overture Services bought it for $140 million in February 2003, and Yahoo acquired Overture months later. Bloated into a cluttered portal and outrun by Google's clean single search box, AltaVista faded; Yahoo finally shut it down in 2013, redirecting the address to its own search.
Similar items
Ask Jeeves
The search engine with a cartoon butler you asked full questions in plain English. Type "How tall is the Eiffel Tower?" and Jeeves would fetch the answer — a friendlier face on the early web.
Lycos
The wolf-spider-named search engine with the eager black Labrador that would 'Go Get It!' One of the first search giants — briefly bigger than Yahoo — and one of the great cautionary tales of the dot-com bubble.
Netscape Navigator
The browser with the shooting-star "N" and the throbbing loading icon that, for millions, simply was the early web. Netscape dominated the mid-1990s before losing the browser war to Microsoft's bundled Internet Explorer.
GeoCities
The free web hosting empire where the internet learned to be chaotic. GeoCities gave millions of people their first webpage, organized into themed neighborhoods, and established the visual language of under-construction GIFs, MIDI soundtracks, and blinking text that defined the early web.