To the user, it looked like this:
And, as I recall, it was quite revolutionary. Turns out Digital put it together as a technology showcase, for DEC’s Alpha-powered line of computers, as told here:
In the spring of 1995, scientists at Digital Equipment Corporation’s Research lab in Palo Alto, CA, introduced a new computer system - the Alpha 8400 TurboLaser - which was capable of running database software much faster than competing systems. Using this powerful tool, they devised a way to store every word of every page on the entire Internet in a fast, searchable index.
In order to showcase this technology, a team led by Louis Monier, who was a computer scientist with DEC’s Western Research Lab, conceived a full text search engine of the entire web. By August 1995 the new search engine conducted its first full scale crawl of the web, which bought back about ten million pages. In the autumn, DEC decided to move AltaVista beyond the labs and offer it as a public service on the web, to highlight DEC’s internet businesses. The company tested the search engine internally for two months, allowing 10,000 employees to put the system through its paces.
On December 15th, 1995, less than six months after the start of the project, AltaVista opened to the public, with an index of 16 million documents. It was an immediate success, with more than 300,000 searchers using the engine on its first day. By the end of 1996 AltaVista was handling 19 million requests per day. AltaVista quickly became a favorite of both casual searchers and information professionals.
AlphaServer Turbolaser on wikipedia.
Image is from
via
AltaVista Search Engine History Lesson For Internet Nerds