In 1997, the interface of Yahoo! was available in seven languages: English, French, German, Japanese, Korean, Norwegian, and Swedish, with websites classified in 63 sections. Yahoo! was launched three years earlier by David Filo and Jerry Lang, two students at Stanford University, California, as an online directory to give access to websites and sort them out by topics. The directory quickly became quite popular because people found it more handy than search engines like AltaVista, where these tasks were fully automated. However, when a search didn't give any result in Yahoo!, it was automatically shunted to AltaVista, and vice versa. December 1997 > Babel Fish, the first free machine translation software In December 1997, AltaVista was the first search engine to launch a free machine translation software called Babel Fish -- or AltaVista Translation -, which could translate up to three pages from English into French, German, Italian, Portuguese or Spanish, and vice versa. The software was developed by SYSTRAN (acronym of "System Translation"), a company specializing in automated language solutions. Babel Fish was a hit among the 12 million internet users of the time, with more and more non-English-speaking users, and contributed to the plurilinguism of the web. Babel Fish was followed by other tools developed by Alis Technologies, Globalink, Lernout & Hauspie, and Softissimo, with free and/or paid versions available on the web. December 1997 > The translation tools of Logos for free on the web In December 1997, Logos -- a global translation company based in Modena, Italy - decided to put on the web for free the linguistic tools used by its translators, for the internet community to be able to use them as well. The linguistic tools were the Logos Dictionary, a multilingual dictionary with 7 billion words in fall 1998; the Logos Wordtheque, a multilingual library with 328 billion words extracted from translated novels, technical manuals, and other texts; the Logos Linguistic Resources, a database of 553 glossaries; and the Logos Universal Conjugator, a database for verbs in 17 languages. In 2007, the Logos Library (formerly Wordtheque) included 710 billion words, Linguistic Resources included 1,215 glossaries, and the Universal Conjugator (formerly Conjugation of Verbs) included verbs in 36 languages. 1998 > The online database of the first volume (1751) of the Encyclopedie