Thursday, September 18, 2008

AltaVista

AltaVista


AltaVista is one of the oldest and most well-known search engines. It was launched in

December 1995. It was owned by Digital, then run by Compaq (which purchased Digital

in 1998), then spun off into a separate company, which is now controlled by CMGI. Over

the years it has lost its prominent position to Yahoo and Google.



George McMillan is the CEO of CMGI, Inc. that owns AltaVista. According to the last

financial report (fiscal 2001) by parent company CMGI, the "search and portals" division

of the company, of which the majority comprises AltaVista's operations, generated $37

million in revenue with an operating loss of $72.7 million.



In March 2002 AltaVista has launched its new release of Enterprise Search v2.0 software

that it sells to the Enterprise search market, similar to Inktomi and Verity. AltaVista

recently launched important freshness and relevancy initiatives, crawling key areas of the

Internet four times per day and increasing relevancy by 40%.



AltaVista also executed an agreement pursuant to which Overture Services, Inc. will

distribute its 'Pay-For-Performance' search listings on AltaVista's North American sites.

The companies signed similar agreements in both Germany and the U.K. during the third

quarter. Under the terms of these agreements, AltaVista and Overture will share the

revenue resulting from user click-throughs to Overture's customers' Web sites.

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