Altavista was purchased by Overture, which was then purchased by Yahoo!

Altavista, was initially developed by Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) engineers to show off the power of the Alpha Microprocessor. When it was released to the public, AltaVista was the best search engine on the Web quickly passed Excite and Lycos as the favorite of Web researchers. AltaVista also introduced a language translation tool, Babel Fish, for converting text and Web pages automatically into different languages.

DEC was later sold to Compaq which sold AltaVista to CMGI. CMGI turned AltaVista into a Consumer Web portal complete with Pam Anderson television advertisements. After the Internet bubble popped and Google took over the search world with its PageRank system, AltaVista backtracked to its search roots. CMGI sold AltaVista to Overture in the spring of 2003, and Overture later bought by Yahoo! which has combined Inktomi, AltaVista and AllTheWeb into Yahoo! Search.

Owned By: Yahoo!

Stock Symbol & Quote : YHOO