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| AltaVista Company Background |
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Internet search pioneer AltaVista Company is a leading global provider of search services and technology. The company continues to advance Internet search with new technologies and features designed to improve the search experience for all users. Built on a foundation of over 50 technology patents, with innovations in multilingual and translation support, AltaVista provides integrated search results to give users immediate access to relevant information including Web pages, multimedia files and up-to-the-minute news. Headquartered in Palo Alto, Calif., AltaVista is a majority-owned operating company of CMGI, Inc. (Nasdaq: CMGI). |
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AltaVista Search Technology
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AltaVista's search technology has been a leader since debuting as the first full-text Internet search service in 1995. The company added multilingual search with support for 25 languages in 1997; debuted 20 local country sites between 1999 and 2001; launched multimedia (audio/video/image) search support in 1999; was the first major search engine to introduce free Internet news search in 2001; and unveiled AltaVista Prisma™, its powerful assisted search tool, in 2002. Through constant innovation, AltaVista has been issued more search-related patents than any other major search engine company. And through our persistent focus on search excellence, AltaVista continues to transform the search experience to help users find the most relevant information available on the Web.
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Our Goal
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A cornerstone of AltaVista's mission is to provide access to information to the global community, and we are dedicated to setting the standard for search technology and how people find information. As the Web becomes larger and more complex, finding relevant information efficiently has become increasingly vital to Internet users. By innovating our proven search technology and adapting to the changing complexity of the Internet, we help users find what they need quickly and intuitively. Our topical searches aggregate information into highly segmented indexes, helping users refine their searches and quickly access the most pertinent and useful information. The company's `Power of Precision' philosophy underlies everything we do as we strive to deliver the most powerful search tools available. We continue to evolve with new initiatives dedicated to continually improving freshness, quality and relevancy to help users get the precise results they seek.
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A History of Innovation
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AltaVista, which means "a view from above," was inspired by the creation of big ideas from a team of experts with a fascination for keeping track of information. During the spring of 1995, scientists at Digital Equipment Corporation's Research lab in Palo Alto, CA, devised a way to store every word of every HTML page on the Internet in a fast, searchable index. This led to AltaVista's development of the first searchable, full-text database on the World Wide Web.
Other notable AltaVista inventions include the first-ever multi-lingual search capability on the Internet and the first search technology to support Chinese, Japanese and Korean languages. We are proud of Babel Fish, the Web's first Internet machine translation service that can translate words, phrases or entire Web sites to and from English, Spanish, French, German, Portuguese, Italian and Russian.
Today, we are committed to being the leading company in search technology. Our search sites provide consumers with the best search capabilities available on the Internet, and our Search Software is helping businesses apply state-of-the-art search technology and structure to huge volumes of data. As AltaVista continues to develop new and greater ways to fulfill the needs of Web users and enterprise, our "view from above" promises to look better and better.
AltaVista is a majority owned company of CMGI, Inc. (Nasdaq: CMGI).
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