Altavista's creator and original implementor was Paul Flaherty (1964-2006) (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Flaherty http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Flahert

Altavista's creator and original implementor was Paul Flaherty (1964-2006) (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Flaherty http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Flaherty). Altavista (altavista.dec.com) began life in his office at the DEC Network Research Lab in Palo Alto, CA. As Altavista usage grew, it consumed machines (alphas in those days), filling his office and moving into the hallway. Eventually it moved to its own facility and became something more than a research project. Altavista was, pre-Google, the best of the search engines. I am fairly sure that the original idea for Altavista was a droll comment made by Andy Freeman at lunch that sketched the possibility of a smarter-than-inverted-list search engine for the Internet; Paul made it all happen.