AltaVista Relaunches, This Time With Marketing Budget.

AltaVista Co relaunched its portal yesterday with an extravagant event in New York City. The relaunch marks yet another move sideways for a service and technology that has been passed from company to company with nobody seemingly fully knowing what they want to do with it. However, there were some new technology enhancements announced yesterday, together with a makeover of the entire look and feel, but CMGI Inc, which owns 83% of AltaVista Co must be praying that its new $120m advertising campaign stretching through mid-2000 is enough to push the company into at least the top three most-visited sites to generate enough ad revenue so it can take the unit public. And judging by the current rankings, it is going to have a job on its hands to achieve that much growth.

AltaVista is a web site that has succeeded up until now not because of great marketing but because users believe it has one of the most comprehensive indexes of the web and it's about time someone grasped the potential of the technology that underlines the service and used it to its advantage. Executives of the old Digital Equipment Corp used to complain to us that senior management just didn't get the value of the service and it was clear that Compaq Computer Corp either didn't get it or wasn't interested when it tried to relaunch the service in January. Back then AltaVista CEO Rod Schrock, still a Compaq employee said the emphasis would no longer be on page views or audience growth, but on revenues, seemingly forgetting that those first two things are what drives the last one in this model.

Schrock says the search engine part of the service now indexes 90% of all web sites, which is a difficult claim to verify. He says it includes 250 million pages - and that's after 100 million duplicates, or near-duplicate pages have been filtered out. That figure will be at 400 million unduplicated pages by the end of this year, says Schrock. Greg Memo, the company's' VP and general manager of the search element says a lot of work has been done improving the relevancy of two- and three-word searches, which are still the most popular. However, during the demos and ads shown yesterday, all the inquiries were in the form of questions to the Ask AltaVista service, which uses technology licensed from Ask Jeeves Inc.

Memo says the relevancy has been improved using the company's patented Page Knowledge system, about which he couldn't say a lot because the company's worried someone will steal its ideas. But basically it rates the relevancy and quality of a page based, in part on the number of links it has off it and can also recognize key phrases. AltaVista claims to have 45 patents either awarded or for which it has applications outstanding. Schrock called Page Knowledge "our Coca-Cola formula" and said the company intends "to guard it for ever."

AltaVista still hosts its own data center in Palo Alto, now with 130 newly-installed Alpha four-way ES40 boxes, each with 16Gb RAM. Schrock says the total amount of memory is 1TB and the total storage capacity is 20 TB, which he says is enough to house the entire internet.

The interface has been completely made over, with rich colors introduced and the indexed sites split into eight so-called "dimensions": images, audio, video, categories, the web, news, discussion and shopping. One nice touch is the ability to enter a search parameter and then click on one of the other tags, such as news, shopping or discussion groups and it will search only within that category using the same search parameters, without the user having to re-enter them. Memo says the news index is revised almost constantly to supply live sports scores from a search inquiry. News is also supplied on the news section of the portal. The company has partnered with a lot of media companies to supply it with news and technology firms such as Tribal Voice Inc and Remarq Inc.

Schrock referred to yesterday's re-launch as "the renaissance of one of the original great brands in the internet," but recognized that it has a way to go to catch the leaders, namely Yahoo Inc and America Online Inc. Schrock said AltaVista is number six in terms of visitors, getting 40 million a month, which does not square with the latest finding from Media Metrix. Its figures for September placed AltaVista 10th in terms of overall visitors across all its properties, and 17th based on the domain altavista.com. Only in the search category did it get in the top six, coming in at number five, with 9.5 million unique users in the month, behind Yahoo, Go, Excite and Lycos, in that order. Schrock estimates that 150 million different people have used AltaVista since its launch in 1995.

Schrock said that AltaVista would not be copying personalization techniques pioneered by Yahoo that have become almost cliches, by merely including the word 'My' in front of the name to identify a personalized version of the site's content. Then, bizarrely, within about five minutes of saying that he announced AltaVista Live, which is the personalized version of AltaVista, which he then referred to as "My Live." The company is adopting a television programming model, so users can see what's happening on their personalized start page, which has been tried before. This whole makeover and marketing will no doubt boost AltaVista's traffic, but it will take something more from AltaVista or a slip by one of the top two before it starts to challenge them.