AltaVista

Dick Sites

Systems Research Center

Digital Equipment Corporation

Abstract

AltaVista is a phenomenally successful Web searching tool introduced by Digital Equipment Corporation in December 1995. As of early 1997 AltaVista Search provides free, fast, public access to a Web index of 31 million web pages and is accessed over 29 million times per weekday. This talk gives an overview of the implementation of the AltaVista search engine. It summarizes the techniques used to fetch Web pages, build the index, and answer queries. A graph shows how the daily AltaVista query load has grown more than linearly since the service was introduced.
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