By 1998, there were way more than five back end servers. I don't remember exactly how many 8400s we had -- 20? 40? Something in that range. They'd gone up to 12 GB of RAM apiece, which came on boards the size of a fairly large baking sheet. The servers were as big as a refrigerator.<p>The primary datacenter was a floor above PAIX in the middle of downtown Palo Alto. Pricy server space.<p>Oft-forgotten bit of history: Elon Musk's first big success was selling Zip2 to AltaVista (under Compaq).
The Alphas of that age were great servers. It's not really surprising that they used an AlphaServer for the indexer, and just one of them. Clustering was still pretty exotic technology at the time (although IIRC VMS already had it). At this time (which was the time I started using altavista, because it was "fast") our machine room had a few alphaservers in it, and the managers and I were always arguing over whether Intel boxes would replace Alphas (and HP, and IBM, and SGI) as high performance computing servers.<p>When Google came along I proudly add their web search form to my home page with the note "They use linux" because I felt it validated my belief that Linux would become the server platform of choice.
I really hope this whole linking-to-an-image thing is just a fad. Fascinating information; it's super annoying not to be able to copy bits out of it or zoom in without blurring.
AltaVista was my favourite search engine when I was a teenager... I remember how back in the day I refused to change to that newcomer named Google... Amazed to know it was running in only 5 servers with those specs! It says it all about how many people was connected to the net in the early days of commercial web. I'd love to know the concurrent connections they had to deal with...
Perhaps a lesson to learn here is consider who won. While AltaVista focused on physical details (number of servers, resource usage, etc...) they missed the boat on the bigger picture - how to significantly improve search engine results. Brin&Page did, filed a couple of patents, secured investment, registered google.com, scaled, etc and won.<p>Perhaps this is another example of what you measure is what you become. I realize it's just one email and we're missing all sorts of context, but to me, this email seems to boast at their technical prowess of being able to pull off the scaling aspects. Perhaps this email indicates measuring physical resources was a higher priority than <i>DRASTICALLY</i> improving search engine results.