Israeli firm in talks to enhance AltaVista
site
By Steven Scheer
JERSUALEM, Aug 19 (Reuters) - Israeli startup Internet company
Slangsoft said on Thursday it was in talks with giant U.S. web search and media network firm AltaVista
Co. to substantially upgrade AltaVista's multi-lingual capabilities.
Arie Mazur, 27, chief executive officer of the two-year-old, Jerusalem-based Slangsoft, told Reuters that
the technology would allow users to search the Internet in 41 languages from any computer around the
world, regardless of the computer's operating system and browser.
''AltaVista is trying to cater to the international user,'' said Mazur, noting that non-native English
speakers are the largest growing segment on the Internet.
At present, AltaVista users can search in 25 languages, although those that are not in Latin script such
as Hebrew or Japanese require the operating system to be in that language.
The Slangsoft technology would allow users to type in their search request in any of the 41 languages --
with accent marks -- using a pull-down virtual keyboard, Mazur said.
Slangsoft, a private company of about 20 people that does not plan on going public until 2001,
specialises in helping businesses cater to a global community using the Internet.
''We deal with issues like language support, virtual keyboards, voice recognition and web globalisation,''
said the Russian-born Mazur.
David Emanuel, a spokesman at AltaVista's headquarters in Palo Alto, California, confirmed the
company was in discussions with Slangsoft but said they were still in the early stages and that
Slangsoft was not the only technology being examined.
''I can't specify when it will go live or if it will,'' he said. ''We're just in discussions. We're taking a look.
We're doing testing. We're greatly interested. Nothing has been finalised.''
The technology would be incorporated in AltaVista's Babel Fish web section, which provides translation
of words from English into French, Spanish, German, Italian and Portuguese and from those languages
into English, Emanuel said.
''We would like to enhance our site and stay in a leadership position; no other site has such language
capabilities,'' Emanuel said. He said that, for example, ''with this new technology you could emulate a
Chinese keyboard.''
Babel Fish has about 500,000 ''hits'' a week, he said. As a whole, the AltaVista portal is ranked 10 in
terms of numbers of U.S. users, according to various firms that track web traffic.
AltaVista is 100 percent-owned by Compaq Computer Corp. (NYSE:CPQ - news), but most of its
ownership is being transferred to Internet venture fund CMGI Inc.
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