The name, which means "a view from above," was inspired in 1995 by scientists at Digital Equipment Corporation's Research lab in Palo Alto, California.
They devised a method to store every word of every HTML page on the Internet in a fast, searchable index. This led to AltaVista's development of the first searchable, full-text database on the World Wide Web.
The company's product BabelFish was the Web's first Internet machine translation service that could translate words, phrases or entire Web sites to and from English, Spanish, French, German, Portuguese, Italian and Russian.
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