Chances are you've heard of AltaVista in reference to the revolutionary Internet search site. If not, you can certainly find out about AltaVista, either by visiting the www.altavista.com site, checking out wikipedia, or even read the book AltaVista Search Revolution.
Chances are, unless you are familiar with enterprise search technology, you haven't heard of the AltaVista software, a small business unit based out of Andover Ma. which productized the Internet search technology and created the AltaVista Search Engine and later AV Enterprise Search product lines. These multi-platform products included a single node search engine application supporting crawling of Web, database, file systems, and email.
The real value, however, was the included SDK, which allowed 3rd party developers to integrate the AltaVista Search technology directly into their applications and services. This provided for a very tight, high performance, full text search ability. The SDK was used by many OEM and search centric customers.
Alas, AltaVista's then parent company CMGi lacked the vision and ability on how to capitalize on the enterprise search market. Eventually the enterprise search group was sold off - first to Overture and later to FAST Search & Transfer, and the product lines retired. The AltaVista Enterprise Search products are no longer commercially available, though the technology may live on for quite a while in deployed applications.
