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Altavista: The rise and fall of the biggest pre-Google search engine
161–170 of 323 posts
Re: Altavista: The rise and fall of the biggest pre-Google search engine
#162Altavista were also the first ones doing online translation. babelfish.altavista.com, anyone remember that? The Babelfish being Douglas Adams' fictional fish that you stuck in your ear to use as a universal translator. there was also a fake domain called alta-vista.com that was very much of the goatse variety.
Remember Xerox PARC's map viewer, developed by Steve Putz in June 1993, running on a SparcStation 2?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xerox_PARC_Map_Viewer
There was a way to embed maps in a web page and provide a bunch of points of interest to overlay on the map.
Metricom was using it to provide coverage maps of their pole top box locations, for their spread spectrum wireless mesh radio network (it was rolled out in the Bay Area around 1994-1996 or so).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ricochet_(Internet_service)
I remember being impressed by how cool and powerful (and generous) it was for one web site like Xerox PARC's map viewer to provide dynamic map rendering services for other web sites like Ricochet's network coverage map!
Then a decade later, along came Google Maps in 2005.
Also:
http://www2.parc.com/istl/projects/www94/mapviewer.html
A particularly innovative use of the map service is the U.S. Gazeteer WWW service created by Brandon Plewe [Plew1]. It integrates an existing Geographic Name Server with the PARC Map Viewer. A user simply enters a search query (e.g. the name of a city, county, lake, state or zip code) and a list of matching places is returned as a formatted HTML document. Selecting from the list generates another HTML document consisting of two maps (small and large scale) with the location highlighted (using the Map Viewer's mark option). The server in New York does not generate or retrieve the map images, since they are references directly to the HTTP server at Xerox PARC. The user's WWW browser retrieves the map images from the server in California and displays the complete document to the user.
Documentation:
https://web.archive.org/web/20080621011940/http://www2.parc....
FAQ:
https://web.archive.org/web/20080420130346/http://www2.parc....
Details:
https://web.archive.org/web/20080608142726/http://www2.parc....
/mark=latitude,longitude,mark_type,mark_size place a mark on the map. ",mark_type" (1..7) and ",mark_size" (in pixels) are optional. multiple marks can be separated by ";" (see example below).
/map/color/mark=37.40,-122.14;21.35,-157.97 Specifies marks for Palo Alto, California and Pearl Harbor, Hawaii.
Re: Altavista: The rise and fall of the biggest pre-Google search engine
#163DEC was based in Maynard, MA not CA. We had a couple excellent teams in the Bay area that were acquired from Xerox as I recall. The Systems Research Center in Palo Alto and WRL.
AltaVista was not the only business that DEC failed to capitalize on. We had an $800M networking business when Cisco was just starting. DEC defunded that business to invest more in other projects. We had a storage server business that we sold to a little company call EMC too. It's quite sad...
Re: Altavista: The rise and fall of the biggest pre-Google search engine
#164When David Wetherell, of CMGI fame, bought Alta Vista and was driving it to the IPO, I remember telling him urgently that Google was eating AV lunch. He just brushed me off, as if I was telling him nonsense. Same fate with Lycos and if you will Yahoo.
Re: Altavista: The rise and fall of the biggest pre-Google search engine
#165Earlier quoted context omitted.
It still doesn't always respect the quotes.
People always seem to claim this on HN but it's never happened for me - do you have an example?
It's more noticeable for niche topics, which google tends to struggle with in general.
I remember trying to google something about Sufism and its relationship to mysticism and the occult...and google brought up a bunch of results from right wing conspiracy websites claiming that Islam was related to the "New World Order".
Re: Altavista: The rise and fall of the biggest pre-Google search engine
#166This article misses one of the primary reasons for AV's demise -- we didn't update our primary index for several months just as Google was gaining mindshare. A ridiculously high percentage of our front page links were 404s, while Google was always fresh. This was particularly bad because one of our earlier strong points was fresh indexes. Our ability to refresh the supplementary index on the fly was awesome. When you…
From the article: "[Alta Vista] broadened the use of boolean operators in search. Like some competing search engines, it supported AND, OR, and NOT."
My recollection is that Alta Vista supported boolean operators, but defaulted to OR while Google defaulted to AND. So searching Alta Vista for something like "$CommonWord $UncommonWord" would return results with high-ranking pages for $CommonWord that drown out all the low-scoring pages for $UncommonWord, whereas Google would return results that match the intersection (which would actually be relevant to the user's query). I'm convinced this default might have made a bigger impact on Google's success than any PageRank magic.
Re: Altavista: The rise and fall of the biggest pre-Google search engine
#167This 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…
>one of the primary reasons for AV's demise -- we didn't update our primary index for several months just as Google [...] I'd say that our failure to maintain a high quality index was directly caused by our loss of focus,
Do you believe Google's strategic decision to use commodity computers and hard drives gave them any competitive advantage (cheaper cost, scaling, etc) compared to DEC Alpha servers?
As an outsider, it seems like Google could iterate its data centers faster and cheaper and therefore, their web crawlers were cheaper to run (also run more frequently), also cheaper to store terabytes of data, and also cheaper to service search queries.
Re: Altavista: The rise and fall of the biggest pre-Google search engine
#168Earlier 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?
Google appears to respect the quotes for me. Changing the example query above to `"film" "noir" -"film noir"` returns results that mention noir films but not the phrase "film noir". However, searching for `film noir -"film noir"` without quotes on the individual words does return a Netflix page titled "Film Noir".
Re: Altavista: The rise and fall of the biggest pre-Google search engine
#169Earlier quoted context omitted.
I suspect it's a reflection of the way the majority of their audience interacts with search. For a large number of people, Google's ability to answer the underlying question, rather than explicitly identify pages where all search terms appear, means it works better. If you think of Google as a way to get answers, this is good. If you think of Google as a search engine, and particularly if you have historical experien…
"Google knows better than you" gives way too much credit IMHO. Google Search is nearly useless for my most searched topics today, and even dangerous in that it gives you a very wrong perception of what is out there.
Any examples? I find it hard to believe it is "nearly useless for most searched topics". It is easy to check, go to your search history and look at your last 10-20 queries and count how many them useless.
Re: Altavista: The rise and fall of the biggest pre-Google search engine
#170Earlier quoted context omitted.
Interesting idea. I figured it was due to the user base of 2019 being very different than that of 2010, and Google adapting to the fact that most of their users aren't technology literate and cannot formulate clear search queries, so they just try to guess what might be of interest to them.
It's also that after bootstrapping with text search and page rank, they can incorporate a lot more useful signals in there ranking algorithm: the clickstream on the search results, and page visit time after the click. If the majority of their user base would actually want precise search, this clickstream would not reorder the results, but it does. So most users are happier with imprecise ranking. The wealth of user t…
Idk, from what I've seen, page rank is still the super major factor that's responsible for 90%+ percent. I work for a few large affiliate projects. Renting subdirs on high-link-count-sites = instant top 3 for anything, even the most competitive keys, even when it's totally unrelated to the site's other content. The whole "we have more than 200 factors" seems like mostly hot air to me personally.