AltaVista

AltaVista and its regional variants is a crawler based engine. Now owned by Overture (Yahoo!), here's their own opinion of themselves, in red!

AltaVista, a business of Overture Services, Inc., is a leading provider of search services and technology. AltaVista continues to advance Internet search with new technologies and features designed to improve the search experience for consumers. Based in Palo Alto, Calif., AltaVista has a rich history of innovation embodied in 61 search-related patents.

The History...
AltaVista means "a view from above". In 1995 scientists at Digital Equipment Corporation's Research lab in Palo Alto, CA, devised a way to store every word of every HTML page on the Internet in a fast, searchable index. This led to AltaVista - the first searchable, full-text database on the World Wide Web. From it's premier position in the late nineties, AltaVista has now become an 'also-ran', (in my opinion) but remains among the best for image search.

Other notable AltaVista inventions include the first Web-wide search technology to support Chinese, Japanese and Korean languages.

Translate a web page
AltaVista are proud of their Babel Fish Translation tool, the Web's first Internet machine translation service that can translate words, phrases or entire Web sites to and/or from Chinese, English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Russian and Spanish.

Acknowledgement of information from AltaVista