Louis Monier @ AltaVista: The Man Who Could Have Bought Google for $1 Million

On July 4th weekend of 1995, Louis Monier deployed a spider across the Internet to search for and catalog all existing web pages. He chose July 4th weekend because he was worried that his spider might break the Internet. And, to be fair, it actually did... at least for New Zealand. As in the entire country of New Zealand.

That initial crawl helped Monier develop the index that would eventually become AltaVista, the world'd leader in web search years before anyone would be using "google" as a verb.

This episode of Web Masters features host Aaron Dinin having a conversation with Louis as he shares the story of AltaVista in his own words and gives some incredible insights into what the earliest days of the Web were like.

For a complete transcript of the episode, click here.