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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

#151

Post by JadeNB »

reificator wrote: post #140
BryantD wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> > 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...

Are you responding to BryantD's admission of (widespread) bias by accusing BryantD of bias? This seems to add nothing to the conversation.

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

#152

Post by 0xADEADBEE »

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?

This happened to me just this week! I was trying to find a specific Onion article, so I searched various permutations, many of them including "the onion" which wasn't respected in the result output. I was absolutely furious that the one escape hatch I have to ameliorate bad searches was taken away from me.

Give it a try - I run CookieAutoDelete so it is 'theoretically' a clean search each time if that makes any difference.

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

#153

Post by JadeNB »

Infernal wrote: post #102
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…

Why was that primary index not updated for those several months? What happened that led to that?

BryantD responded to a similar question in another thread (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19172762).

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

#154

Post by 0xADEADBEE »

acranox wrote: post #138
JoeSmithson wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I try to wean myself off Google search every few months but I've never managed to stick. What do you like for an alternative? I'm probably due another attempt.

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

#155

Post by rconti »

pureliquidhw wrote: post #50
d35007 wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah but is it pronounced like "wares" or like "Juarez"?

I know it's wares with a z, but I've always pronounced it "Juarez" in my head. Never gave it a thought until now!

I had a friend who insisted on saying "juarez". Annoyed the hell out of me! :)

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

#156

Post by [deleted] »

miketuritzin wrote: post #147
amelius wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Page rank is just one way to order pages. Another is relevance. How you combine the two ordering schemes is another big question.

Good point - pagerank is a query-independent signal which is harder to game, but the (very large) part of ranking that is query dependent was still very much gameable.

[deleted]

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

#157

Post by porpoisely »

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…

I suppose that could be one of the reasons, but I believe the main reason was google won over CS students in high school and college in the late 90s and early 00s. I was introduced to google in high school because it was the best search engine for looking up programming code for my CS classes. Better than altavista, excite, etc. And naturally the word spread, not to mention the people maintaining computers, labs, etc all set google as the default search engine.

Sadly, now google is a terrible mess of moderated and curated nonsense.

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

#158

Post by rconti »

adsadadsad wrote: post #4

Altavisa and astalavista for years! Astalavista was for your all your serialz, crackz and porn passwords back in the day of http basic auth and 56.6k modems

I had to Google (amusingly) to ensure I had my historical pedantic pet peeve correct (memories can fail us).

It was just 56k. I seem to recall back in the day people appended the ".6" for no apparent reason other than it sorta seemed logical after we had 14.4k, 28.8k, 33.6k, and then.. all of a sudden.. 56k.

(and, if I recall correctly, for technical reasons it was really only 52k, and even then, only if you were lucky, usually it was less.

I seem to recall that the equipment was theoretically capable of 56k but in actual implementation, even a perfect POTS system wouldn't do over 52k, and in the real world, it would usually negotiate lower due to distance from CO, quality and number of connections and equipment in between, etc).

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

#159

Post by didip »

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…

> Also, any AV article which doesn't note that we bought Elon Musk's first company is inherently flawed. ;)

I have always wondered what Zip2 actually was. Can you shed some lights?

Was it like a primitive version of Yelp?

Did the map work like Google Maps?

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

#160

Post by raiyu »

I think the main takeaway from this is really conception. There was a problem that a team set about to solve. They were left on their own to operate because solving search wasn't really what the company was interested in, as much as showing how powerful their computers were.

Left to their own devices Altavista became a successful search engine because it was able to focus on what users really wanted from search and do tremendous pioneering in that area.

It was my default search engine of choice before google gained steam.

However, from there, once value was created corporate entities began to try and extract more value. Now the user was no longer front and center, and unless the business decisions coincided with what the user wanted you would obviously begin to move the product further and further away from it's core user benefits.

This is a very typical processes in most businesses. Businesses till think that their needs come first, rather than their customers/users. This happens so frequently that it really is a just insane that no one addresses it. Eventually those business people get enough things wrong that they are left no choice but to return to the core of what made them successful and just hope that the market hasn't moved away to a competitor.

In Altavista's case the market had already shifted.

Doesn't matter how many books you write on this subject this continues to occur and really highlights the need for a strong product focused CEO so that they can ensure that the customer comes first and the business second.

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