Pioneering search engine AltaVista opened its service to the public 30 years ago. The original fast and clean internet search destination launched on December 15, 1995, with an enormous (for the time) 16 million pages indexed. Within a year of its establishment, it scaled from a day-one workload of handling 300,000 user queries to tens of millions of requests every day. That’s impressive, given that the service went live ostensibly as a tech demo for DEC’s Alpha server hardware.
Hardware
Search pioneer AltaVista’s star shone bright with a clean and minimal UI 30 years ago — engine lost momentum after multiple ownership changes and the embrace of the web portal trend
