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Company Profile - AltaVista

1070 Arastradero Rd.
Palo Alto, CA 94304

Phone: 650-320-7700
Fax: 650-320-7720
Website: www.altavista.com

Key Facts

Provides search software to more than 1,200 companies.
Creator of Babel Fish, the Web's first language-translation service.
Performs millions of search queries daily in more than 25 languages and has local search sites in about 20 countries.
Enterprise Search Software clients include Amazon, Borders, Daimler-Chrysler, and Siemens.

Company Overview
Created by Digital Equipment Corporation and now majority owned by CMGI (it owns 80 percent), AltaVista pioneered its way onto the Internet in 1995 as one of the first search engines available to Web users. In addition to handling search queries, AltaVista provides a free language-translation service with Babel Fish, online shopping, and a Yellow Pages directory. It also licenses its search technology to intranet, enterprise, and e-commerce clients worldwide.

Though AltaVista, which means "a view from above," expanded at one point to include a wide array of portal features such as free Internet service and chat rooms (it acquired financial discussion site Raging Bull), head-on competition with the likes of Yahoo! and AOL proved to be too much. The company sold Raging Bull to Terra Lycos and stripped its site of many of the products and services it once provided.

Now in competition with Google, AltaVista is looking for ways to keep up. As such, it released its AltaVista Prisma service, which produces up to 12 sub-groups of results, in an effort to kick back more refined search results.

Major Line of Business : Internet & New Media

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