... and in 2019 the "digital.com" domain is apparently hosted by a site that can't handle the traffic of this article. SPECIAL BONUS: Their current robots.txt appears to be blocking the old Digital.com pages from the WayBack machine. Argh.
Altavista: The rise and fall of the biggest pre-Google search engine
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Re: Altavista: The rise and fall of the biggest pre-Google search engine
#12pizza "deep dish" +Chicago
Re: Altavista: The rise and fall of the biggest pre-Google search engine
#13I recall a dinner party where a few people were discussing the web, probably 1994. Essentially we all agreed the web was unusable because it was too hard to find what you were looking for; the best ideas we had for solving that problem were pretty bad. Google changed the world. What used to be buried on the 3rd or 4th page of Altavista results, if it appeared at all, was suddenly front and center. (Yahoo’s directory…
Do you think Google is the new AOL? Way back AOL had their homepage where you saw an AOL recommended part of the web. You still had access to the web but for most first time users it was easier to use than a web browser alone. I say this because I’ve been wondering if we now have a Google snapshot of the web instead of AOLs homepage. Don’t get me wrong search is much better than a more or less static homepage of topi…
One of those "Google is the new AOL" moments hit me when I heard a commercial for Google on the radio recently. Specifically, it was someone explaining that they had a feature built especially for veterans to find jobs relevant to them, and that you could get to it by typing "jobs for veterans" into Google search.
It just sounded so much like the old AOL Keyword feature, which a lot of people forgot about, but was literally often advertised on TV or radio as how to get to a given site or web feature.
Re: Altavista: The rise and fall of the biggest pre-Google search engine
#14... and in 2019 the "digital.com" domain is apparently hosted by a site that can't handle the traffic of this article. SPECIAL BONUS: Their current robots.txt appears to be blocking the old Digital.com pages from the WayBack machine. Argh.
It's apparently owned by a UK company called Quality Nonsense - https://qualitynonsense.com/portfolio/digital-com/ - currently featuring such insightful content as "Error establishing a database connection".
Re: Altavista: The rise and fall of the biggest pre-Google search engine
#15I recall a dinner party where a few people were discussing the web, probably 1994. Essentially we all agreed the web was unusable because it was too hard to find what you were looking for; the best ideas we had for solving that problem were pretty bad. Google changed the world. What used to be buried on the 3rd or 4th page of Altavista results, if it appeared at all, was suddenly front and center. (Yahoo’s directory…
For a long time I used yahoo. The nice thing with a directory is that if you found an interesting website you could look up similar websites in the same yahoo category. I think this functionality is just gone.
Re: Altavista: The rise and fall of the biggest pre-Google search engine
#16If I remember correctly, Altavista produced better results than Google back then, for me at least. However, Altavista took seconds to load the first page (on 56k) whereas Google's first page loaded almost immediately. I honestly didn't expect Google to have survived the dot-com bust back then. This was before they figured out online adword auctions.
Google was immediately better then anything else from day one. Google was launched in Fall of 1997. In January 98 is when I started using it and it was hands down better then crawlers or any other search engine.
Re: Altavista: The rise and fall of the biggest pre-Google search engine
#17I recall a dinner party where a few people were discussing the web, probably 1994. Essentially we all agreed the web was unusable because it was too hard to find what you were looking for; the best ideas we had for solving that problem were pretty bad. Google changed the world. What used to be buried on the 3rd or 4th page of Altavista results, if it appeared at all, was suddenly front and center. (Yahoo’s directory…
I had a good experience with Altavista via the "NEAR" operator which was never fully implemented by Google (there is a wildcard "*" in Google added much later). With the NEAR operator you can find pages where terms are closer and narrow the results. Without NEAR terms can appear in discrete places of the page.
Re: Altavista: The rise and fall of the biggest pre-Google search engine
#18What I miss most about Altavista was the boolean search operators, and being able to reliably insist that words either must or must not appear in the results with the + and - characters. With Google these operators are seemingly just hints that it feels free to ignore.
+noir +film -"pinot noir"
Re: Altavista: The rise and fall of the biggest pre-Google search engine
#19I recall a dinner party where a few people were discussing the web, probably 1994. Essentially we all agreed the web was unusable because it was too hard to find what you were looking for; the best ideas we had for solving that problem were pretty bad. Google changed the world. What used to be buried on the 3rd or 4th page of Altavista results, if it appeared at all, was suddenly front and center. (Yahoo’s directory…
For a long time I used yahoo. The nice thing with a directory is that if you found an interesting website you could look up similar websites in the same yahoo category. I think this functionality is just gone.
Are there any sites with a "crowdsourced" directory? Might be interesting to have something like wiki-pedia that is a curated source, but curated by a larger group of volunteers. Although, I could see it getting corrupted by marketing purposes, but at the same time it might be able to be maintained cheaply by a foundation. Human intelligence providing grouped sites might be a useful asset, and there could be statistics/requirements for getting listed.
Re: Altavista: The rise and fall of the biggest pre-Google search engine
#20... and in 2019 the "digital.com" domain is apparently hosted by a site that can't handle the traffic of this article. SPECIAL BONUS: Their current robots.txt appears to be blocking the old Digital.com pages from the WayBack machine. Argh.
They do at least acknowledge the history of the name, though you'll do some scrolling to see it: https://digital.com/about/
That said, being a nerd of a certain age range, I saw "digital.com" and I got very excited about something I didn't get when I actually clicked on the link ...