AltaVista

AltaVista is identified as a search engine that, alongside Lycos, seemed poised to become the leading alternative to Yahoo! before Google rapidly changed the competitive landscape. Its brief role in the account frames the book’s larger point: Google’s advantage came from using the Web’s many links to aggregate judgments about which pages mattered.

Position in the Search Market

When Google began in 1998, Yahoo! appeared to hold a firm grip on search. If Yahoo! faltered, the book says, AltaVista or Lycos seemed certain to emerge as the last major contender. AltaVista is thus presented as a plausible successor in a market whose future initially seemed to belong to established search engines.

Google’s Rise and the Web’s Links

Within a couple of years, Google had become the default search engine for regular Internet users because it was better at finding the right page quickly. The account attributes that performance to PageRank, an algorithm defined by Google’s founders, Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page. PageRank treats a link from one page to another as a vote, while giving greater weight to links from pages that are themselves important. Against the expectation that AltaVista might inherit Yahoo!’s position, Google’s rise demonstrates how aggregating the Web’s distributed link structure could reorder the search market.