AltaVista is one of the world leaders in search technology and as a search engine has been online since 1995. They developed the first searchable, full-text web page database on the World Wide Web. It was born out of Digital Equipment Corporation's Research lab in Palo Alto, California.
 
AltaVista claims to have more search related inventions and patents than any other company in existence, including the very first multi-lingual search function on the Internet and the first search technology to translate & support Chinese, Japanese & Korean languages.
 
Their technologies continue to raise the bar, making AltaVista one the leading search engines among surfers. Their service includes integrated search results, offering users immediate access to the most relevant information including Web pages, multimedia, news, products and services as well as a free language translation feature.
 
Like fast (AllTheWeb), AltaVista is also a provider of high-powered search software solutions for intranet, enterprise and e-commerce applications. Corporate customers include Daimler-Chrysler, Siemens, Amazon and Borders to name a few. Their search technology is embedded in information management solutions from companies like Oracle, Novell, HP and IBM.
 
AltaVista supplemented their own technology with the Ask Jeeves search appliance back in 1999. This allows surfers to submit questions (called natural language parsing) to the search engine rather than just keywords.