Negotiations are underway, but as of midday Tuesday, the deal was not yet done to sell the altavista.com domain name to Compaq Computer, owner of the AltaVista search engine.
"There is no wet ink on a contract," said a spokesman for Compaq, which acquired Digital Equipment for US$9.6 billion earlier this year, taking possession of Digital's AltaVista search engine, located at altavista.digital.com.
The domain name, registered long ago by the owner of a Campbell, California, company called AltaVista Technology, Inc., was reported sold for $3.35 million in a San Francisco Chronicle story citing unnamed sources on Tuesday.
Chad Hill, a spokesman for AltaVista Technology and its president, Jack Marshall, could not confirm that the deal had been finalized. Marshall has apparently signed an agreement, but could provide no further details, Hill added.
The two AltaVistas have long dueled over the domain name, worked out agreements, and gone to court to straighten things out. As a result, the AltaVista Technology site carries a bold-faced advisory that it is not the search engine site. Right below that is a search button that takes visitors directly to the AltaVista site and informs them that they "missed our real homepage."
Last year, Digital Equipment created a small computer program that crawled the Net looking for Web pages that linked to www.altavista.com. When the crawler found a match, the program then emailed a form letter to the webmaster of the site in question, asking whether or not he actually intended to link to altavista.digital.com, the search engine's "real" URL.
At this point, however, AltaVista Technology has changed its name to PhotoLoft.com and plans to announce a new direction for the company on Monday.
Marshall was not available for comment because he was at the hospital with his wife and baby, born Sunday. Presuming the deal does go through, the rumored $3.35 million would make one helluva start to the littlest Marshall’s college tuition fund.
