The Alta Vista search engine for the Internet is one of the hottest properties at Digital Equipment Corp at the moment – at least it would be if it made the company any money. Alta Vista does not make money – it’s a service, Ilene Lang rather disingenuously told Reuter at the Canadian National Internet show – most people expect to make money on the services they offer. But DEC does plan to exploit the success of Alta Vista, which it says is getting some 5m hits a day four months after it was first made available: according to Ms Lang, vice-president of the Connectivity Software Business Unit, DEC plans to introduce at least three new commercial software products based on Alta Vista and We are not planning to sell advertising [as Yahoo! Corp does]. But we might change our mind later. First up will be an Intranet Alta Vista product for corporations so that in-house users can search for documents and data on their company-wide communications system. The other two products will be Village Alta Vista for a group of users on a local network to search for information within the workgroup, and a Personal Alta Vista for users to search their own personal computer files. The products will be piloted soon with commercial launches expected for later in the year. We want to keep crawling the Web as it grows, said Ms Lang, adding that DEC might consider ways of franchising Alta Vista on the Web by allowing others to use the service at their Web sites. Alta Vista will be our Java, she is elsewhere quoted as asserting.
