Who owns AltaVista today?
AltaVista has not worked as a search engine since 2013, and the name belongs to Yahoo Inc. Yahoo picked it up in 2003 by buying Overture Services, the company that had bought AltaVista earlier that year, and it has held the brand ever since.
Yahoo itself changed hands in September 2021, when funds managed by the private equity firm Apollo Global Management completed their purchase of the business from Verizon. That deal made Apollo the majority owner of Yahoo, and with it the owner of what is left of AltaVista: a domain name and a trademark.
Typing altavista.com into a browser does not produce an error. It sends you to Yahoo Search. There is no archive of old AltaVista results behind it, no separate index, and no way to run the kind of query the site accepted in 1997. The redirect is the whole of the estate. We traced every owner Yahoo has had in more detail separately.
How a chip demo turned into the first full-text web search engine
AltaVista started inside Digital Equipment Corporation, the Massachusetts computer maker usually called DEC. In 1995, researchers at DEC's Western Research Laboratory in Palo Alto, California were trying to prove what the company's Alpha processor could do. Benchmark scores were not convincing customers.
The demonstration three of them settled on was to index the entire World Wide Web and let anyone search it. Paul Flaherty proposed the project, Louis Monier wrote the crawler that went out and collected the pages, and Michael Burrows wrote the indexer that made them searchable in a fraction of a second.
AltaVista opened to the public on December 15, 1995 with about 16 million pages in its index, an enormous number for the time. It handled 300,000 queries on its first day. Within a year it was fielding tens of millions of requests a day, far past anything DEC's marketing department had planned for a hardware demonstration.
That is the part of the story that still gets told. The rest of it is a company handing a working product to owners who each wanted it to be something else.
What made AltaVista better than a directory in 1996?
Before AltaVista, finding a page usually meant browsing a directory. Yahoo, the biggest name on the web then, paid people to sort sites into categories by hand. A site that nobody had filed was effectively invisible.
AltaVista searched the text of the pages themselves. You could look for an exact phrase, combine terms with AND, OR and NOT, restrict results to one language, and get an answer back in about a second. For research that was a different class of tool, and the rival crawlers of the day, Lycos among them, covered far less of the web.
The interface mattered as much as the index. AltaVista was a search box on a nearly empty page, and the results came back as a plain list. Marking the engine's thirtieth anniversary in December 2025, Tom's Hardware described it as the site that pioneered "the fast and uncluttered search results model users loved, before Google stole its clothes and its thunder."
It shipped extras that were genuinely new at the time, including free machine translation under the Babel Fish name and search operators that most competitors could not handle.
Why did Compaq turn AltaVista into a portal?
Compaq bought DEC in January 1998 for $9.6 billion, the largest acquisition the computer industry had seen, and AltaVista came along with the servers. Compaq wanted DEC's enterprise business and its engineering staff. It did not particularly want a search engine, and it had no settled view of what one was worth.
What Compaq did know was that Yahoo was the most valuable property on the web, and that Yahoo was a portal: news, mail, shopping, weather and horoscopes on a single page. So it rebuilt AltaVista in that shape. News feeds, shopping links, free email and advertising modules went onto the home page, and the search box, the only thing most visitors had come for, got pushed down the screen.
The pages got busier and slower at the exact moment a competitor was going the other way. Google put one box on a white page and nothing else. People who wanted a search engine went to the site that still behaved like one.
How much did AltaVista sell for, and to whom?
Compaq did not keep it long. On June 29, 1999 it sold 83 percent of AltaVista to CMGI, an internet holding company, in a stock and notes deal valued at about $2.3 billion, and kept 17 percent for itself. CMGI intended to take AltaVista public.
The offering never happened. The dot-com market broke first, CMGI's own shares fell with it, and AltaVista went through layoffs and a run of chief executives. The portal strategy was abandoned and the site went back to being a search engine, by which point the audience had already gone.
In February 2003, Overture Services agreed to buy AltaVista's business for $140 million, $60 million of it in cash and the rest in Overture stock. That is a drop of about 94 percent from the CMGI price in under four years. "Adding AltaVista is an important step forward in expanding our capacity and commitment to search," said Ted Meisel, Overture's chief executive, on a conference call reported by InternetNews in 2003. Later the same year Yahoo bought Overture, and AltaVista changed hands for the fourth and final time.
What finally killed AltaVista?
Nothing dramatic. Yahoo kept altavista.com running for a decade as a second-tier property while its own search moved onto other technology. The index behind the box stopped being AltaVista's. The extras went one at a time, Babel Fish among them, handed off to Microsoft's translation service.
On June 28, 2013, Yahoo posted a list of products it was closing. AltaVista was on it, with a date of July 8 and one line of instruction: "Please visit Yahoo Search for all of your searching needs." The engine went dark that morning, seventeen years and seven months after it opened.
The explanation the obituaries reached for is roughly the right one. AltaVista had the better index in 1996 and the worse owners from 1998 onward. DEC treated it as an advertisement for processors, Compaq treated it as a Yahoo imitation, CMGI treated it as a stock offering, and Google treated search as the business itself. One of those four readings was correct, and it is the only one still trading.
Frequently Asked Questions
Does AltaVista still exist in 2026?
No. AltaVista stopped working as a search engine on July 8, 2013, when Yahoo closed it. The altavista.com address still resolves, but it redirects to Yahoo Search rather than to anything AltaVista built, and no version of the original index is available to search.
Who owns AltaVista now?
The AltaVista name and domain belong to Yahoo Inc., which acquired them in 2003 by buying Overture Services. Yahoo has been majority-owned by funds managed by Apollo Global Management since September 2021, so Apollo controls whatever commercial value the AltaVista brand still carries.
Why did AltaVista lose to Google?
AltaVista lost to Google because the owners it had between 1998 and 2003 spent those years rebuilding it as a Yahoo-style portal instead of improving search. Compaq buried the search box under news, shopping and email modules, users left for Google's single box, and by the February 2003 sale to Overture Services AltaVista was worth $140 million against the $2.3 billion CMGI had paid in 1999.