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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

#131

Post by JohnFen »

diegocg wrote: post #54
spudlyo wrote: post #18

What 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"

Have you tried searching with verbatim mode? Without Verbatim mode, Google will try to be smart, eg match car when you search automotive, making spelling corrections, etc. Also, keep in mind that google removed the + operator, but you can achieve the same results using double quotation.

> keep in mind that google removed the + operator, but you can achieve the same results using double quotation.

I can't. The plus operator meant the the word you applied it to must be in the search result. Quoting the word does not do this for me.

Re: Altavista: The rise and fall of the biggest pre-Google search engine

#132

Post by ozzyman700 »

wtetzner wrote: post #97
diegocg wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you tried searching with verbatim mode? Without Verbatim mode, Google will try to be smart, eg match car when you search automotive, making spelling corrections, etc. Also, keep in mind that google removed the + operator, but you can achieve the same results using double quotation.

How do you get to verbatim mode?

Search something on google, on the results page click 'tools'>'all results'>'verbatim'

afaik putting a term in double quotes does the same thing but I am unsure if the implementation is really the same, the effect seems to be

Re: Altavista: The rise and fall of the biggest pre-Google search engine

#133

Post by drallison »

A few historical notes: Paul Flaherty (1964-2006) was a principal engineer at the the Digital Equipment Network Research Laboratory. Paul is credited with having the idea for Alta Vista, but I think that it was Andy Freeman's sudden flash of insight that led to Paul's development.

Paul had been in Italy at a trade show; when he returned he talked with Brian Reid, who headed the Lab, about the need to find a demonstration project that showed off the top-of-the-line Alpha computers.

Paul and Andy and I used to have lunch together frequently. At one point, just after Paul returned from Italy, we were talking about Internet search at lunch. I'd been using the Magellan search engine and had some comments about how useful a better search engine would be.

Andy began talk about the problem and sketched out how a better search engine might work and how a web crawler could gather the information needed to do an index.

Paul listened and then went back to his office and enlisted Brian Reid's help in resourcing a search engine project. Brian got Louis Monier and Mike Burrows involved. The three of them did the hard work of reducing the concept to a real program running on an Alpha computer.

Alta Vista was an instant success with Alta Vista computers overflowing Paul's office and cluttering the hall nearby as the team worked to satisfy market demands for search.

Re: Altavista: The rise and fall of the biggest pre-Google search engine

#134

Post by JohnFen »

ocdtrekkie wrote: post #91
macintux wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interestingly, that was the idea I distinctly remember from the dinner party: someone suggested the only fix for Internet searches was to implement something like AOL Keywords globally. A central registry of keywords.

What would you be trying to "fix" here? More often than not, the first result for a given query on most common search engines is the correct, authoritative source for something. If I search for a company, the company's official website is nearly always the first real result. The only thing I think is really wrong with search (and all major search engines right now are guilty of this) is making paid ads look very simi…

> More often than not, the first result for a given query on most common search engines is the correct, authoritative source for something.

I can't remember that happening in years with Google. Now, it's unusual if the thing I'm searching for even appears in the first page.

Re: Altavista: The rise and fall of the biggest pre-Google search engine

#135

Post by agumonkey »

BryantD wrote: post #99

This article misses one of the primary reasons for AV's demise -- we didn't update our primary index for several months just as Google was gaining mindshare. A ridiculously high percentage of our front page links were 404s, while Google was always fresh. This was particularly bad because one of our earlier strong points was fresh indexes. Our ability to refresh the supplementary index on the fly was awesome. When you…

was it ever considered to make altavista non-free ? even for advanced use-cases ? or follow google ads strategy ?

giving away a free demo of prowess is cool, but it's a big reason for its death I guess

Re: Altavista: The rise and fall of the biggest pre-Google search engine

#136

Post by JohnFen »

bwb wrote: post #30
ocdtrekkie wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 li…

I do not understand how you guys can call Google the new AOL, Google search works like a charm at a huge scale. What is the problem?

For me, the problem is that Google doesn't work like a charm at all. It used to, but it's been consistently getting worse over the years.

Re: Altavista: The rise and fall of the biggest pre-Google search engine

#138

Post by acranox »

JoeSmithson wrote: post #107
timcederman wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It still doesn't always respect the quotes.

People always seem to claim this on HN but it's never happened for me - do you have an example?

I know gmail is different than search, but if you do a quoted search for a string in gmail that has zero matches, it will return a few "close" matches.

This really confused me, because I was trying to find something specific, and it found a few emails, so I read them, and then was confused that they didn't actually take about the specific thing I was trying to remember. Then I realized that they I included one of the words from my string.

In this case, a close match was completely useless, and ended up wasting my time reading irrelevant results. A message saying "we didn't find that, but here's a few close matches" would have been more helpful and avoided wasting my time.

The reasons in this thread about non precise search results are half the reason I stopped using Google Search about a year ago. I get why they've done it, but I don't like it.

Re: Altavista: The rise and fall of the biggest pre-Google search engine

#139

Post by beagle3 »

BryantD wrote: post #99

This article misses one of the primary reasons for AV's demise -- we didn't update our primary index for several months just as Google was gaining mindshare. A ridiculously high percentage of our front page links were 404s, while Google was always fresh. This was particularly bad because one of our earlier strong points was fresh indexes. Our ability to refresh the supplementary index on the fly was awesome. When you…

PageRank is using the stationary distribution of a random walk; that’s very different than just incoming links (which AV did have)

In a way, it ranks a link by its own incoming links (which are ranked by their incoming links etc). It was possible to game AV by setting up 100 sites that points to your own.

In pagerank, you essentially had to convince already popular pages to link to yours.

For a while, google effectively had no spam, and AV had lots. Eventually, spammers learned to game pagerank; the arms race is still on.

Re: Altavista: The rise and fall of the biggest pre-Google search engine

#140

Post by reificator »

BryantD wrote: post #127
CydeWeys wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why didn't you update your primary index for several months? Were there serious technical breakages?

Internal issues I'm not comfortable talking about in depth. It was a combination of technical problems and political problems; I expect any specific person's opinion of the percentage breakdown of those factors depends a lot on which group they were in at the time.

> I expect any specific person's opinion of the percentage breakdown of those factors depends a lot on which group they were in at the time.

I feel like that tells me where your percentage would lie...

EDIT: I apologize, it was intended as a joke to lighten the mood. It's never a good thing to lose one's job or have a company fail, even that long ago, so my response is to attempt humor.

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