Their advantage was a patented algorithm called PageRank, which sorted websites by relevance, or the number of times they were cited by other pages. Most other search engines found results based on keyword density, but Brin and Page's method focused on the human input nestled between websites. Google quickly devoured the competition.
PageRank has remained the backbone of Google Search for 20 years, as the internet has grown into a pervasive and necessary tool for modern existence. And as the internet has expanded, so has Google. It isn't just the world's No. Google holds humanity's knowledge in its search bar, and it has the ability to shape conversations on a massive scale.
Imagine the internet as a million-volume collection of books, each one densely packed with essential information and cat pictures. Google represents just one book in this series, offering up only the information that its authors -- i. Given Google's dominance as a search engine, everyone around the world is reading the same book, while , other stories collect dust on the shelves.
Even though searching is becoming more personalized, tailored to a user's location, interests, purchases, email subscriptions and past inquiries, these results still live entirely within the book that Google wrote.
Simply by deciding which information most of the world should see, Google has the power to build or destroy businesses of all sizes, shift election results , sway public opinion and reinforce the unconscious biases of developers themselves. Here's how The Guardian put it in For example, search for the word 'man,' and you get images almost entirely of white men, albeit of varying ages.
A search for the word 'woman' also reveals an overwhelming majority of young, white women. Unfortunately for DEC, the creation of AltaVista was not enough to save itself, and it seemed to be a classic case of too little, too late.
Also that year, Digital sued Intel, accusing the latter of utilizing patented technology governing branch management used to speed up a computer chip to develop the Pentium microprocessor. Intel, of course, countersued, accusing DEC of violating 14 Intel patents. It was the death-knell for the year-old computer giant. Palmer stepped down and the company was completely absorbed into Compaq. Digital Equipment Corporation, a world leader in implementing and supporting networked business solutions, was gone.
Compaq acquired DEC in order to improve its customer services battle against Dell. Immediately, the company chose AltaVista as the primary default search engine for the Compaq Presario line of desktop PCs and began altering AltaVista to make it more user-friendly.
By January , AltaVista Company was restructured as a wholly owned subsidiary of Compaq, and Rod Schrock was named the president and CEO of the new entity, serving in that position until October Over the next six months—while Compaq acquired Shopping. AltaVista also set a new strategy in motion with the introduction of robust services for web-savvy users, such as Enhanced AltaVista Search offering the Internet's first web index freshness guarantee and new multimedia search capabilities ; the AltaVista Microportal the world's first microportal, a personalized desktop window to premier AltaVista services ; and Shopping.
Late in , AltaVista entered the Internet service provider ISP arena by becoming the first leading Internet brand to provide nationwide dial-up free Internet access supported by advertising , signing up , users within the first three months, an unprecedented Internet event.
A few months later, AltaVista unveiled a dramatic new media and commerce network of services. Besides AltaVista Search which was, at the time, the Web's most powerful and comprehensive guide , the company attempted to diversify into the Internet portal arena with the launch of AltaVista Live! Written by Claire Broadley Updated December 22, CC BY 2. Enter AltaVista.
It was a groundbreaker in the search engine sector, and it introduced many advanced features that other search engines had not even thought of when they launched: AltaVista was the first search engine to allow users to search for things using natural language. It was the first search engine to attempt to create a complete index of the web using its own data, rather than a curated directory of listings or partial results compiled from different sources. Its crawler, Scooter, was capable of indexing full text pages , making AltaVista the first searchable full text database of the web.
It broadened the use of boolean operators in search. But it also supported two additional operators : NEAR and parentheses. It allowed searchers to limit the amount of results that were returned from one domain. That cut back in noise and duplicate pages in results, which was important in an age where duplicate content on the web was commonplace. It was the first to allow multi-lingual search. It launched mirror sites in Malaysia and Spain in It was the first to allow people to search for images, video, and audio alongside text content.
It was the first tool that could translate entire websites to and from English, Spanish, French, German, Portuguese, Italian, and Russian. It did this using its Babel Fish translator, which would later become part of Yahoo.
Yahoo closed AltaVista quietly in The Legacy of Altavista AltaVista arguably never had a fair shot at reaching its full potential. Summary AltaVista was considered a dinosaur of the web by the time Yahoo closed it down. It was sold off in to a venture capital firm who prepared an IPO that was abandoned in the wake of the dotcom crash of AltaVista was then bought by Overture in and became part of Yahoo when that firm was bought later that year.
Search analyst Danny Sullivan wrote a eulogy for AltaVista on the Search Engine Land site saying the search service was "loved" during its brief heyday and that it deserved a better send off than Yahoo had given it. Yahoo mulls ads based on influence. Fans braced for Google Reader demise.
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