AltaVista Search Provides First Multilingual Search Capabilities on the Internet

Global Search Network gains new affiliate sites in ASEAN and Southern Europe

LITTLETON, Mass.-June 26, 1997 -- To make the Internet far more accessible and valuable for millions of non-English-speaking Web users, Digital Equipment Corporation today announced that its AltaVista Search service (http://altavista.digital.com) can now offer World Wide Web search results by language.

Digital said this major advance in search technology will help expand the global reach of the Internet and drive the creation of local language Web pages by ensuring they can be easily found with AltaVista Search-the Internet's most popular search engine. This multilingual search capability is only available on the worldwide AltaVista Search network, which this week unveiled two new mirror sites-the AltaVista Asiawide mirror site (http://altavista.skali.com.my ) based in Malaysia's Multimedia Super Corridor, and the Spanish-based mirror site (http://www.altavista.tsai.es) for Southern Europe and Latin American.

"With the addition of multiple-language search capabilities and our two new network affiliate sites, we continue to the lead the way in Internet search," said Ilene H. Lang, Digital vice president for AltaVista. "By allowing users to choose language-specific search results, AltaVista makes the Web much more accessible to users throughout the world, particularly those whose mother tongue is not English."

Breakthrough Multilingual Search

Multilingual searching is most valuable to users who don't use English as their first language. According to Digital, an estimated 25 percent of all Web content is written in languages other than English. In addition, the multilingual search capabilities will also benefit users who want to limit their results to English-language Web pages. While most search engines can find pages by geographic domain, such as pages residing on a server in France, AltaVista Search locates specified-language pages in all geographies, regardless of the domain. This type of search will typically provide users with a larger set of documents than a country-specific index or query.

"For example, more than half of all Web pages written in French are located outside of the .fr (France) domain," said Louis Monier, chief technical officer for AltaVista. "Conversely, over 30% of the pages in the .fr domain are not written in the French language. With the new multilingual search capability of AltaVista Search, users have a powerful advantage to be able to quickly and accurately find pages in their chosen language anywhere on the Web."

The AltaVista Search Network Expands

With its new network affiliate partners, Alam Teknokrat in Malaysia, an Asia-wide Internet Content Organiser, and Telefonica in Spain, one of the world's largest telecommunications companies, the AltaVista Search Network will provide higher performance for millions of users in regions experiencing explosive Internet use. With the addition of the Malaysia site, (http://altavista.skali.com.my) the AltaVista Search service extends its reach from the Mediterranean to Indonesia. Through its AltaVista Spain/Portugal site, (http://www.altavista.tsai.es) AltaVista Search will now be more accessible to the Spanish and Portuguese speaking populations in Europe and in Latin America.

The AltaVista Search Network, consisting of mirror sites in northern and southern Europe, Latin America, Australia and Asia, gives users a user interface in their native language tailored to local cultures as well as localized services. The network distributes traffic to AltaVista Search sites throughout the world, enabling users to access the same powerful index and features without having to access the main AltaVista Search site in Palo Alto, California (http://altavista.digital.com). Local market partners can also adapt the AltaVista Search Service to meet the needs users by translating the user interface and help pages into local languages and providing content, advertising and related services targeted to their regional markets. Advertising revenue generated for the sites also helps AltaVista's affiliate partners improve return on investment through incremental regional bandwith capacity.

In addition to ASEAN and Iberia, AltaVista currently licenses affiliate sites in northern Europe through Telia TeleCom AB of Sweden (http://www.altavista.telia.com) and in Australia through affiliate Telstra/Yellow Pages (http://www.altavista.yellowpages.com.au.) The AltaVista Search network currently serves more than 18 million search queries per day, and enables users to search for documents located on more than 700,000 Web sites. Network affiliate sites use the same index, search and retrieval software as the main AltaVista Search Service site in Palo Alto, CA.

Digital Equipment Corporation is a world leader in open client/server solutions from personal computing to integrated worldwide information systems. Digital's scalable Alpha and X86 platforms, storage, networking, software and services, together with industry-focused solutions from business partners, help organizations compete and win in today's global marketplace.

Editorial Contacts:

Chuck Malkiel
(508) 486-2902	
chuck.malkiel@altavista.digital.com

Krys Monaco or Christina Lynch
(617) 266-8400
kmonaco@hi-tech.com
clynch@hi-tech.com

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