AltaVista, every mention

Google Part I: Origins of Search. How the Best Business in Human History Happened (Audio) · Acquired Jun 30, 2025 · 16 mentions

• ▶ 30:15 Ben Gilbert Gopher, AltaVista, Hotbot, InktoMe, Lycos, Yahoo, Excite, Infoseek.
• ▶ 49:13 David Rosenthal The first is AltaVista.
• ▶ 49:18 David Rosenthal AltaVista pre-Google was, like, pretty good.
• ▶ 49:23 David Rosenthal AltaVista has a fascinating history.
• ▶ 49:29 David Rosenthal Do you know where AltaVista came from?
• ▶ 50:07 David Rosenthal This is where AltaVista came from.
• ▶ 50:18 David Rosenthal So before AltaVista, all the other web crawlers out there that were building search engines, they were just, like, single-threaded processes.
• ▶ 51:51 David Rosenthal And before AltaVista and parallelization of crawling, all the indexes of all the other search engines were super small.
• ▶ 52:28 David Rosenthal So when AltaVista spins out of deck and launches as a commercial company and entity in and of itself, it's big claim to fame is its index.
• ▶ 52:41 David Rosenthal AltaVista still kind of sucked at relevancy and speed.
• ▶ 52:45 David Rosenthal So the information retrieval algorithms that AltaVista and others were using was highly based on how many times
• ▶ 53:11 David Rosenthal And the other thing that, you know, I guess AltaVista was probably fine at this, but not good was speed.
• ▶ 53:19 David Rosenthal I mean, AltaVista had great hardware from deck,
• ▶ 53:23 Ben Gilbert That's the main thing to underscore here is that, yeah, they're doing this cool parallelization thing, which leads to a bigger index.
• ▶ 53:29 Ben Gilbert But if they had to be their own company, it is an extremely expensive company to run to have all that deck hardware for search, which we should say doesn't have a great business model yet.
• ▶ 54:36 David Rosenthal Like Yahoo was the big player, not AltaVista or Excite or Lycos or Infoseek or any of these others.