How to Make Your Mark

"I had a very strong sense of ownership and responsibility for what I saw as my baby, my creation," says Monier, 44. "I am a researcher at heart, and what I care about most is solving problems. With AltaVista, I was able to see my experiment all the way to the end. I suppose I could have just taken one of the offers and joined another search engine or portal, and I would have been a lot richer today. It probably would have been less painful -- and less interesting -- than sticking with AltaVista. But I don't think I would have learned as much."

Monier, a soft-spoken, teddy bear of a guy with unruly black hair, grew up in a small town in France, where he dreamed of becoming an astronomer. After earning his doctorate in mathematics and computer science, he came to the United States in 1980 to do research at Carnegie Mellon University. Three years later, he went to work at the renowned Xerox PARC. He spent six years there building experimental tools to design silicon chips before joining Digital Equipment Corp.'s (DEC) research lab in Palo Alto, where his mandate was to "invent the future."

He dabbled in chip research for a few more years and then turned his attention to the fledgling Internet. The DEC lab was home to some of the earliest Net heads, and after poking around the Web with his colleagues, Monier recognized the need for a search engine that could move faster to catalog the burgeoning online content. In the spring of 1995, he put himself through a two-week crash course on the Internet, pestering researchers to teach him what they knew.

By summer of that year, he had a working version of what he called a "crawler," or "spider." Instead of fetching pages one at a time, as traditional search engines did, his search engine, dubbed "Scooter," could query for thousands of pages at once -- and not tie up Web servers while doing it. His prototype was a thousand times faster than any other search engine at the time. He coupled it with another researcher's index system, and AltaVista was born.

He put the new engine up internally at DEC, and the response was immediate. "Through word of mouth, this thing just went crazy," he says. "I started getting a huge amount of feedback internally from people saying, 'I've never seen anything like that.' Salespeople were telling me, 'It's a competitive advantage. I can find everything about everything.' That gave me the incentive to put on a suit, fly to the East Coast, and ask for some money to do the real thing -- which meant getting one of those big servers and putting my idea on the Web."

Monier got his hardware. He set the launch date for December 15, 1995, and the day before, 200,000 people visited the site -- even though he hadn't announced the Web address. "This thing just exploded," Monier says. "We had traffic going up day by day. We had press coverage. We had analyst coverage. We never spent a penny. We saturated the machine in a matter of days, so we had to order new processors, memory, and everything else. Before Christmas, we were saying, 'We've got to do something to get a second machine.' "

For Monier, this stretch of time went by in a blur of adrenaline. He was riding a creative high and learning more each day about Internet users. He was both inventor and customer-service desk, and he thrived on the contact that he had with real people who emailed or called to say that AltaVista had helped them locate a long-lost cousin or a childhood friend. Of course, not all of the feedback that he got was positive. There was the phone call from a military agency demanding to know how he got access to its classified Web server. (As it turned out, a sloppy supplier had publicly listed the link on its site.)

There was also a late-night call from a panicked man in Canada who'd realized that some postings that he'd made on a discussion forum for gays had been indexed by AltaVista. He was frantic at the thought that some of his coworkers might find the index and out him. "I felt awful," Monier says. "There's much more understanding now about the public nature of the Web. But back then, it was not so clear, and people didn't realize that such a powerful technology was searching the whole Web. I didn't want to hurt anybody. So I spent a good chunk of the night writing a program that would make some pages disappear from the index."

Monier wound up developing a bond with his users that led him to fight ardently against on-site advertisements and non-user-centric changes. He began to think of himself not as just a researcher and a technical person, but also as an advocate.

That December was the beginning of four very long years for Monier. He worked six days a week from 9 AM to midnight, answering emails, tweaking the search engine, and improving the technology. "It went on and on and on," says his wife, Monjoin. "I didn't want him to get off the project because I understood what it meant to him. At the same time, I could see the stress that he was going through because of the lack of support."