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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

#171

Post by syn0byte »

akirby wrote: post #163

DEC 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…

20 years later, SSD drives are eating "enterprise storage" companies alive. Time marches on...

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

#172

Post by jandrese »

cpeterso wrote: post #166
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…

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…

I've long believed that default OR in keyword searches is always a mistake, and the default should always be AND.

The reason being you can just search twice if you want either word, but in the vast majority of cases you want both words when you enter them in the searchbox. Most companies kind of split the difference and put the AND results first then fill in with OR results, but that mostly just leads to "if your answer isn't on the first page, it's not going to be on the second or the hundredth".

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

#173

Post by gwbas1c »

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 wouldn't say it was just the index issue that allowed Google to take prominence. It was the browser toolbar that really killed AltaVista.

I didn't know anything about Google until mid 2000, and when I used it, I just thought it was an AltaVista clone.

Fast forward to fall 2000, and once after getting bad results on AltaVista, I tried Google again. At the time, I never bookmarked either of the sites or set them as my homepage. I remember, when I used Google, I thought to myself, "I'm going to switch to whoever comes out with a browser toolbar. Search should just be part of the browser."

About a week later, I had some bad results on AltaVista, and typed in google.com. Immediately I saw the "try our toolbar" banner.

At that point, I switched to Google, and I NEVER went back to AltaVista. (I think sometime in 2001 I tried AltaVista again, out of loyalty, to see if they finally had a toolbar, but the results were so bad I was in shock.)

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

#175

Post by pedrocx486 »

ben_w wrote: post #51
myself248 wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And the ability to do case-sensitive search. "DoS" != "DOS"

I’ve seen academics upset that Google insisted on changing their search term from “adsorb” to “absorb”. Apparently Google Scholar (?) couldn’t be forced the way Google.com could be.

I don't get the "(?)" you made, but yes, it's a thing:

https://scholar.google.com/

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

#176

Post by fishingisfun »

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…

interesting stuff. Where are most of you guys now a days? since you were involved with search

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

#177

Post by mda »

DylanBohlender wrote: post #41
bwb wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I think the crux of the others’ point is that Google’s increasingly complex secret sauce for returning search results, combined with its general ubiquity, has perhaps created a monoculture whereby we view the Web almost entirely through Google’s lens. AOL’s “curation” of the web via its portal was a bit more direct for sure, but I can see how the effect could be similar.

Oh believe me you can find all sorts of non curated filth as well using Google as well. I think it is still a pretty good engine for "if you insist, here is the path to rabbit hole". If you let google know about you, it will tune the results for you. I keep my history for this reason.

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

#178

Post by mda »

JohnFen wrote: post #136
bwb wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Examples? Maybe your expectations grew faster than technology to keep up?

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

#179

Post by UncleSlacky »

entity345 wrote: post #52
siggen wrote: post #9

If 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.

> However, Altavista took seconds to load the first page (on 56k) whereas Google's first page loaded almost immediately. That's why I moved from Altavista to Google. Google had a minimalist homepage and results page which were focussed and loaded very quickly compared to the bloated pages (for the time) of Altavista and Yahoo.

AV did also offer a minimalist site, raging.com, after Google appeared. Going to the site today, it still tries to redirect to https://www.altavista.com/web/text?raging=1/
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