The search engine launched in 1995 and became known for fast full-text web search was AltaVista.
AltaVista publicly launched on December 15, 1995, as a project of Digital Equipment Corporation. Researchers Paul Flaherty, Louis Monier, and Michael Burrows developed the technology to showcase DEC’s powerful hardware. Its fast, multithreaded crawler—nicknamed Scooter—could scan the rapidly expanding web, while its TurboVista database enabled efficient indexing and retrieval.
At launch, AltaVista stood out because it offered a searchable full-text index and Boolean query tools when many competing services relied more heavily on manually assembled directories or limited indexes. It quickly attracted hundreds of thousands of visits and became one of the web’s most prominent search services.
AltaVista later expanded into a portal, changed ownership after Compaq acquired DEC, and was eventually acquired through Overture by Yahoo. Yahoo redirected the AltaVista domain in 2013. It is commonly confused with Google because both became major web-search brands, but Google launched later, in 1998.