Entry No. 115f

IT Writers Awards

Write off:
After an accidental birth, Alta Vista has grown to be the world's most-used internet search engine. Helen Dancer talks to Alta Vista's Vesey Chrichton about dealing with the web's myriad conundrums and contradictions and the challenges that lie ahead.

Assassinated American president John F. Kennedy remains famous for, among other things, his quotes on the nature of the word "crisis". Kennedy noted that crisis, when written in Chinese, was composed of two characters; one represented danger, the other, opportunity. Forty years later, this observation could just as easily apply to the internet, which is proving to be composed of equal parts danger and opportunity. Those who choose to make their business online must deal as deftly with its one side as the other to resolve the conundrums of the multicultural, multilingual and multijurisdictional medium. What's acceptable in one country's eyes is inappropriate, even downright heretical, in another. Dubbed "internet poster child" in The Industry Standard, the Alta Vista engine was conceived not with internet search domination in mind but as a bank of data to prove the concept of a new chip, the Alpha. When Digital Equipment, now subsumed by Compaq, developed the Alpha chip, its engineers, looking for a way to demonstrate its prowess, built a bulletin board, out of which grew an index of the web.

The huge bank of data proved critical for the company in proving the concept of the Alpha chip's speed and processing power but, as a corollary benefit, the engineers found that the data bank was a great search engine, and a powerful resource. But a computer company taking time out from developing and marketing powerful chipsets to market a nascent concept such as internet search just didn't make sense, so Alta Vista ? spun off from Digital ? was born.

Now in its second generation, Alta Vista is making greater inroads in all corners of the physical world by building local versions of the search engine, populating an already impressive index with subsets of regional content in a host of different countries. Australia is the latest pin on the Alta Vista map but, says Vesey Chrichton, the company's international general manager for Alta Vista Europe, Australians need no introduction to it ? such is the global nature of the medium.

"Alta Vista was one of the first internet companies and it's fascinating to arrive here [in Australia] and find there are already a million users of Alta Vista. In Britain, there were 2.5 million users before we even opened shop. I think that's because it was one of the very early sites, one of the early great internet names ? it spread by word of mouth.

"But its provenance was neither useful particularly, or a hindrance, frankly. It was just the right time for an idea like that. I think when they say 'internet poster child', that's probably what they mean."

Localising has its own challenges because the internet is a global place. But choosing not to localise does as well. "There are some very interesting issues to do with how much one should edit what's there," Chrichton says. "Yahoo! has been criticised very heavily in France because on Yahoo.fr it's possible to get to an auction of Nazi memorabilia, which is taking place on Yahoo.com, and that's against the French constitution.

"Yet in the United States it's against the US constitution to prevent someone from auctioning such material. So Yahoo! is in a real bind ? whose constitution is it going to break?

"That kind of issue is going to hit search engines as well because there is internet material that is offensive, illegal or defamatory and cyber-lawyers are going to have to work out what sort of editorial strictures, if any, they are going to put on content." 

As a result, he says, a company's values have to stay very focused. "Our values are to a) always abide by the law of the country in which you're operating, and b) to provide no other constraints on what you signpost. We go for editorial purity." It's a complicated issue, he concedes, since the net does not respect international boundaries. "I don't think we have begun to get to grips with all the issues as an industry. For example, its against the law in China to allow citizens access to all sorts of information, it's against the law in Saudi Arabia to provide access to other sorts of information." Is the notion of offending people immutable, or will values change over time because of the internet? "I agree values are going to evolve. For instance, the concept of nationalism over the next two decades will be transformed. I'm not going to say broken down but changed. The concept of the importance of the nation versus the global village. It's going to evolve because we are living in a global village." 

He believes the sheer explosion in internet use will drive changes we can't yet foresee. "In Alta Vista terms there are 1.1 billion URLs on the internet and we think that will grow to 100 billion over the next five years. That's a massive explosion of information available to humankind. Basically, all human knowledge will be online."

Additionally, lower cost bandwidth will mean that, over the next seven years, most of humanity will have web access ? whether by satellite, cable, ADSL or cellular ? that is 200 times as fast as today's average. The conundrum of providing web access ahead of fresh food, clean air, clean water and the sorts of basic infrastructure that most of us in the First World take for granted is not lost on Chrichton. However, he insists there's an upside and that the aspiration is more rational than simply being the product of a geek's-eye view of the world.

"These things are infinitely more important but [ubiquitous access] will be a great leveller in terms of education. It will enable the underprivileged part of humanity access to education, and also the ability to participate, in trade and in culture, to a far greater extent than is currently possible. It's not the cure-all for human problems but it can definitely contribute." 

The priority chain of wells before web servers, he says, is shorter than it might look. "By all means let's have life before we have knowledge. But knowledge comes reasonably soon afterwards because of the social benefits.

"One of the interesting things about web access is that it's not going to be wildly expensive, so that the net result of a map of increasing bandwidth is that we'll have virtual TV quality, virtually anywhere we are, for minimal cost compared with where we are today.

"The final trend is going to be mobility ? where more people's internet experience is a mobile one. In Japan, for example, there are 8 million mobiles capable of internet access. People say 11 million by the end of the year."

That's where the search-obsessed Alta Vista comes into its own, he says. "Finding things on the internet is the second most popular activity after email. " 

Search is the core activity, and Alta Vista is presently the leader, processing, Chrichton says, 45 million searches a day, while the next largest processes 38 million. That's 83 million searches just on the two most popular engines

Chrichton estimates that the demand for search is growing faster than web access, and Alta Vista has as its core competence that one string ? search. The distinction is what separates his company from others nominally competing in the same space; it's like the difference between an airport and a tropical island.

"For AOL or Yahoo! the game is all about providing such rich material that your customers want to stay because their livelihood depends on traffic, and traffic is built by large numbers of page views.

"Our position is slightly different in that our use to you is delivering results and for you to be able to go on and peruse the information you're looking for. We're not a destination, we're a signpost. An airport ? we get you to the place you want to go."

That's where the obsession pays off, says Chrichton. "It turns out one of our biggest sources of traffic is Yahoo! because people come to us after not having found what they want over there.

"We spend our day sitting around figuring out how to do search better, how to deliver more relevant results. We think that other people have done portals really well, AOL, ninemsn, Yahoo! and other local heroes in European countries. We're not going to be the world's greatest portal site but we are going to be the best at search."

Fellow search engine Google says it has catalogued 1.1 billion URLs, a claim Alta Vista matches, although, of the 1.1 billion, only an estimated 600 million are real up-to-date pages with no broken links. "We've indexed those 600 million and de-duplicated, got rid of all the spam, and that's what constitutes our global index," says Chrichton, offering the claim as a talisman of Alta Vista's search-geek credentials.

"We don't engage in any sort of mine's-bigger-than-yours battles with our competitors but we do get obsessed with relevant results and relevant pages, and making sure our relevance algorithms are the most pertinent." The purely Australian content indexed for the Alta Vista's local version, altavista.com.au, amounts to 7.5 million pages, he adds. The future holds smart search, whereby sites you search for are stored in a giant memory, and the engine will then SMS or email you when something pertinent is added to the volume of human knowledge stored on the web. "We think those sorts of things are what people really want ? proactive search." Or just the ability to save a complicated search query, or save results either for yourself or to email them to someone else.

It's all a question of constant refining, however. Usability labs are as critical a part of the process as search obsession. "You learn so much. Things you thought were obvious are not. Things you thought were God's greatest gift are not. And things you thought were minor turn out to be wildly important." 

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