Compaq inherited the world's best search engine — and let Google beat it

AltaVista launched on December 15, 1995, as a project of Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC). It was the first full-text, boolean-searchable index of the web, built on a multi-threaded crawler (Scooter) and an efficient backend (TurboVista). Within two years it was handling 80 million hits per day, introducing innovations that defined search: advanced operators (and, or, near, host:), Babel Fish machine translation, and the first CAPTCHA. In 2000, 17.7% of internet users used AltaVista; Google, then two years old, had only 7%.

In January 1998, Compaq acquired DEC for $9.6 billion. The deal gave Compaq the world's best search engine — a business the PC maker had no idea how to run. Instead of keeping AltaVista as a search engine, Compaq redesigned it as a web portal to compete with Yahoo, naming Rod Schrock CEO and launching a $120 million marketing campaign. An IPO filed for $300 million in December 1999 was cancelled after the dot-com crash. In June 1999, Compaq sold 83% of AltaVista to CMGI for $2.1 billion in stock and $220 million in cash — but the portal strategy had already diluted the search experience.

Ownership changed again: CMGI sold AltaVista to Overture Services for $140 million in February 2003, and Yahoo acquired Overture (including AltaVista) five months later for $1.63 billion. AltaVista's search results were quietly replaced by Yahoo's own index, and the domain redirected to Yahoo Search in June 2013. The service was officially shut down on July 8, 2013. The company that once defined web search had spent 15 years being passed between parents that either misunderstood what they owned or had no interest in it.