AltaVista was an early web search engine established in 1995. It was once one of the most popular search engines, but it lost ground to Google and was purchased by Yahoo! in 2003, 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 since then, the domain has redirected 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 came up with the original idea, along with Louis Monier and Michael Burrows, who wrote the crawler and indexer, respectively. The name "AltaVista" was chosen in relation to the surroundings of their company at Palo Alto, California. AltaVista publicly launched as an internet search engine on December 15, 1995 at altavista.digital.com.
At launch, the service had two innovations that put it ahead of other search engines available at the time: it used a fast, multi-threaded crawler (Scooter) that could cover many more webpages than were believed to exist at the time, and it had an efficient back-end search, running on advanced hardware.
Alta Vista, o Chalchihuites, is a mesoamerican archaeological site near the municipality of Chalchihuites in the Mexican state of Zacatecas, in the northwest of Mexico. It is located the west of Cerro Sombrerete in the northwestern corner of the Durango state, it is believed that the site was a cultural oasis that was occupied more or less continuously from AD 100 to AD 1400.
The site is within the “Sierra de Chalchihuites” – from the Nahuatl word chalchíhuitl, the name means “precious Stone”, where the Chalchihuites-Chichimec culture was established.
The Altavista name is due to a ranch that existed in the vicinity, at the time when archaeologist Manuel Gamio visited the area. There are opinions that this ceremonial center was developed by the súchil branch of the Chalchihuites culture.
It is related to the Chalchihuites culture that flourished during the mesoamerican classical period, it had a social and political structure; had a hieroglyphical writing system. And constructed formal cities and ceremonial centers, as they had urbanization techniques, a numbering system, astronomy, and other important knowledge. These people were known as Chalchihuites, found sufficient elements to favor their social, economic and military life, thus decided to settle here.