What was the name of AltaVista's web crawler?

AltaVista’s web crawler was named Scooter. It was a fast, multithreaded crawler developed for Digital Equipment Corporation’s AltaVista project and helped the search engine build an exceptionally large web index.

Scooter was programmed by Louis Monier, one of the DEC researchers behind AltaVista. At the service’s 1995 launch, its ability to crawl many more pages than contemporary rivals was a major advantage. The crawler gathered pages, while separate indexing software organized their contents so users could search the resulting database.

Scooter is often confused with names associated with later search engines. Googlebot belongs to Google, Bingbot belongs to Microsoft’s Bing, and Slurp was associated with Inktomi and later Yahoo. None of those names refers to AltaVista’s original crawler.

AltaVista paired Scooter with TurboVista, its high-performance backend database. The combination helped AltaVista become one of the most prominent search services of the late 1990s, although Google’s rise and changing ownership eventually pushed it aside.