BOOK OF THE MONTH : JULY 2013

Title: AltaVista Search Revolution

Authors: Eric J. Ray, Richard Seltzer, Deborah Ray 

Pages: 400

Publisher: Osborne Publishing

ISBN: 10: 0078824354

Price: $ 3.18

Altavista was an early web search engine. It was once one of the most popular search engines, but it lost ground with the rise of Google and was purchased in 2003 by Yahoo!, which retained the brand but based all AltaVista searches on its own search engine. On July 8, 2013, the service was shut down by Yahoo! and the domain now redirects to Yahoo!'s own search site.

AltaVista was created by researchers at Digital Equipment Corporation's Network Systems Laboratory and Western Research Laboratory who were trying to provide services to make finding files on the public network easier.Paul Flaherty was responsible for the original idea, and two key participants were Louis Monier, who wrote the crawler, and Michael Burrows, who wrote the indexer. 

The name AltaVista was chosen in relation to the surroundings of their company at Palo Alto. AltaVista was publicly launched as an internet search engine on December 15, 1995 at altavista.digital.com. AltaVista's site was an immediate success. Traffic increased steadily from 300,000 hits on the first day to more than 80 million hits per day two years later. 

AltaVista itself became one of the top destinations on the web, and in 1997 it earned US$50 million in sponsorship revenue.In 1996, AltaVista became the exclusive provider of search results for Yahoo!. In 1998, Digital was sold to Compaq and in 1999, Compaq redesigned AltaVista as a web portal, hoping to compete with Yahoo!. Under CEO Rod Schrock, AltaVista abandoned its streamlined search page, and focused on added features such as shopping and free email.

AltaVista provided Babel Fish, a web-based machine translation application that translates text or web pages from one of several languages into another. It was later superseded by Yahoo! Babel Fish and now redirects to Bing's translation service.In December 2010, a Yahoo! employee leaked PowerPoint slides indicating that the search engine would be shut down as part of a consolidation at Yahoo!.In May 2011, the shutdown commenced.

The book AltaVista Search Revolution helps you get the most out of AltaVista's power, using tables and examples to show you how to get what you need. The authors first explain how to do basic searches, then move on to more advanced searches with Boolean operators and AltaVista's special parameters. Chapters detail how to do such things as search Usenet newsgroups and how to translate hits into other languages. 

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