AltaVista, one of the first major Internet search engines, was publicly launched by Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) on September 15, 1995. DEC aimed to showcase the power of their new line of computers through this search engine.

On December 15th, 1995, AltaVista was opened to the public with an index of 16 million documents. It gained immediate popularity with over 300,000 users on its first day.

By the end of 1996, AltaVista was handling 19 million search requests per day, becoming a favorite search engine for both casual users and professionals.

In February 1997, AltaVista provided the first multilingual search capability on the Internet.

In May 1997, AltaVista provided the first-ever, single web search tool for Chinese, Japanese, and Korean users.

In February 1998, AltaVista was the most favored search engine among professional researchers, with 45 percent choosing it in the 'Internet Search-Off' study.

In June 1998, Compaq purchased the domain name altavista.com from AltaVista Technology Incorporated for $3.3 million, strengthening its online presence.

AltaVista's stake is sold to CMGI for $2.3 billion, detailed in Computerworld on July 5, 1999.

Gist makes a deal as reported in Editor & Publisher on September 4, 1999.

AltaVista expresses concerns about CMGI position potentially hindering deals, according to the Wall Street Journal on February 17, 2000.

AltaVista reveals intentions to sell its own advertisements, according to the New York Times on August 9, 2000.

The Chief Executive Officer resigns from AltaVista, detailed in the New York Times on October 20, 2000.

By 2001, Google surpassed AltaVista with its innovative system, leading to a decline in AltaVista's popularity and relevance in the search engine market.

To fight against malicious internet bots, AltaVista implemented the first practical CAPTCHA schemes to protect against fraudulent account registrations.

AltaVista underwent a relaunch at the end of 2002, offering new search functionality including image and multimedia search options, and Babel Fish, the web's first Internet machine translation service.

A fake tombstone announcing the 'death' of the AltaVista search engine was displayed at the Google Mountain View office. This symbolized the decline of AltaVista as it was overshadowed by more successful search engines.

In December 2010, a Yahoo! employee leaked PowerPoint slides indicating that AltaVista would shut down as part of a consolidation at Yahoo!.

On June 28, 2013, Yahoo! announced on its Tumblr page that AltaVista would shut down on July 8, 2013.

On July 8, 2013, the AltaVista project was terminated due to Google's dominant position among search engines, leading to the end of an era in the history of internet search.

AltaVista Search Engine celebrated its 25th anniversary on December 21, 2020. This search engine was known for being the first to allow natural language queries on the World Wide Web and for its simple interface with advanced search capabilities.