ALTAVISTA AT A GLANCE

Overview:
AltaVista, a business of Overture Services, Inc., is a leading provider of search services and technology. AltaVista continues to advance Internet search with new technologies and features designed to improve the search experience for consumers. Based in Sunnyvale, Calif., AltaVista has a rich history of innovation embodied in 61 search-related patents. For more information, see www.altavista.com.

A cornerstone of AltaVista's mission is to provide access to information to the global community, and we are dedicated to setting the standard for search technology and how people find information. As the Web becomes larger and more complex, finding relevant information efficiently has become increasingly vital to Internet users. By innovating our proven search technology and adapting to the changing complexity of the Internet, we help users find what they need quickly and intuitively. Our topical searches aggregate information into highly segmented indexes, helping users refine their searches and quickly access the most pertinent and useful information. The company's `Power of Precision' philosophy underlies everything we do as we strive to deliver the most powerful search tools available. We continue to evolve with new initiatives dedicated to continually improving freshness, quality and relevancy to help users get the precise results they seek.

AltaVista, which means "a view from above," was inspired by the creation of big ideas from a team of experts with a fascination for keeping track of information. During the spring of 1995, scientists at Digital Equipment Corporation's Research lab in Palo Alto, CA, devised a way to store every word of every HTML page on the Internet in a fast, searchable index. This led to AltaVista's development of the first searchable, full-text database on the World Wide Web.

Other notable AltaVista inventions include the first-ever multi-lingual search capability on the Internet and the first search technology to support Chinese, Japanese and Korean languages. We are proud of Babel Fish, the Web's first Internet machine translation service that can translate words, phrases or entire Web sites to and from English, Spanish, French, German, Portuguese, Italian and Russian.

•	Delivers Internet's first Web index (1995)
•	First multilingual search capabilities on the Internet
•	First Internet search engine to launch Image, Audio, and Video search capabilities
•	Most advanced Internet search features and capabilities: multimedia search, translation & language recognition, and specialty search
•	Awarded 61 search-related patents, more than any other Internet search company

AltaVista
Overture Services, Inc.
74 North Pasadena Avenue, 3rd Floor
Pasadena, California 91103
Fax: (626) 685-5601
http://www.altavista.com