The AltaVista search engine was launched.
Originated from Paul Flaherty idea, AltaVista was created by researchers at Digital Equipment Corporation's Network Systems Laboratory and Western Research Laboratory, who were trying to provide services to make finding files on the public network easier. The participants for the project were Louis Monier and Michael Burrows.
The name AltaVista was chosen in relation to the surroundings of their company at Palo Alto. AltaVista was publicly launched as an internet search engine on December 15, 1995.
At launch, the service had two innovations which set it ahead of the other search engines: it used a fast, multi-threaded crawler (Scooter) which could cover many more web pages than were believed to exist at the time and an efficient search running back-end on advanced hardware. As of 1998, it used 20 multi-processor machines using DEC's 64-bit Alpha processor. The machines that had 130GB of RAM and 500GB of hard disk space were able to receive 13 million queries per day.
With its hardware capability and distinguishing minimalistic interface compared with other search engines of the time, AltaVista became the first searchable, full-text database of a large part of the World Wide Web.