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Pioneering search engine AltaVista is due to be shut down on 8 July. AltaVista was one of the first search engines to index significant amounts of web content, and proved hugely popular before Google debuted. … AltaVista was launched in 1995 when search engines generally did a poor job of logging information on the web’s rapidly growing population of sites. The search engine was popular because it had indexed about 20 million webpages, far more than any rival at the time. It developed its own “crawler” technology that did the job of finding web pages and logging what was on...

The Altavista police officer who shot and killed an 83-year-old woman Wednesday night is now on administrative leave. We still don't know the officer's name, but reports say that person is a 10-year veteran of the police force. State police are still investigating. The shooting happened Wednesday night at a home on 10th Street in Altavista. Delma Towler was shot while attempting to walk to her sister's house. She was apparently trying to get away from what she thought was an intruder, trying to break into her house. Towler's funeral is 4 p.m. Saturday afternoon at the Altavista Church of...

SAN FRANCISCO - Paul A. Flaherty, a computer engineer who helped create the pioneering AltaVista online search engine, has died. He was 42. Flaherty died March 16 of a heart attack at his home in Belmont, about 20 miles south of San Francisco, family members said Friday. Flaherty came up with the idea of indexing Web pages that made the AltaVista search engine one of the most popular Internet search tools in the mid-1990s.

French president Jacques Chirac yesterday pledged to help fund a new European internet search engine to rival Google and Yahoo as he railed against what he sees as the threat of Anglo-Saxon cultural imperialism. In a speech in Reims, Mr Chirac said: "We're engaged in a global competition for technological supremacy. In France, in Europe, it's our power that's at stake." Mr Chirac's intention is to provide forgivable loans to a Franco-German "multimedia search engine for the internet" being developed by French group Thomson and Deutsche Telekom. The plans reflect Mr Chirac's often-expressed concern about the omnipresence of US culture...

SEATTLE (Reuters) - A Microsoft Corp. employee working on the world's largest software maker's search initiative was arrested last week on charges that he stole source code from the AltaVista search engine two years ago, authorities said on Friday. Laurent Chavet, a former AltaVista employee, was charged with accessing the company's computers in 2002 after he was no longer employed by the Web search provider but before he was hired by Microsoft, according to an FBI affidavit in an indictment issued by the U.S. District Court of Northern California. Sunnyvale, California-based AltaVista was bought by online search advertising provider...

The dramatic collapse in the value of internet companies was highlighted once more by Overture's $140m acquisition of Alta Vista, one of the pioneers of web search and once one of the world's most coveted online companies. Alta Vista's struggling parent CMGI, the Massachusetts-based technology group, has sold one of its crown jewels for just a fraction of the $2.3bn it paid to Compaq in 1999, when it took an 83 per cent stake in Alta Vista. Overture, which calls itself "the world's leader in Pay-For-Performance search", allows advertisers to bid for well-placed spots among web search results on sites...

AltaVista has hit back at the Chinese ban on its search engine, promising to find alternative ways to reach China's 46 million surfers. The US-based site is the second search engine to fall foul of the Chinese Government's strict censorship of the web after Google was banned last week. The company said it was very concerned to find that AltaVista.com and AltaVista.co.uk were inaccessible in China. "Free access to information is the cornerstone of our mission," said General Manager of AltaVista International Kevin Eyres. Limited information "We have tried to contact the Chinese consulate in the US but have had...

<p>SAN FRANCISCO (AP) --  Online search engines are built to find information in seconds. But most leading sites appear to be taking their time meeting a federal request for more transparency on how money influences their display of search results.</p>