Compaq Computer Corp was quicker with its marketing than with its technology on Tuesday, when it finally confirmed long-standing rumors that it had bought the www.altavista.com domain name (CI No 3,463) without first making sure that the site pointed to Compaq’s AltaVista search engine. Surely it would have been better to set up a quick and dirty redirect before alerting the media. Compaq isn’t disclosing what it paid AltaVista Technologies Inc (ATI) for the domain, but a report in the San Francisco Chronicle put the figure at $3.35m, making it the costliest internet domain in history. Meanwhile ATI’s webmasters must be grinning over their server logs, as curious journalists keep checking back to see just when Compaq will stake a claim upon its brand new property.
