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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

#181

Post by INTPenis »

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.

With your insight, could you say if AV had the same business plan as google? To gather data about people and shape services with it?

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

#182

Post by giarc »

rusk wrote: post #101
Finnucane wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

O yeah, the early days of online translation were . . . interesting. Especially fun was bidirectional translation (i.e., english -> german -> english, etc.).

It was “good enough” to get a sense of what was in the document. Whats particularly interesting is how little things have come along since then !

I can't comment on how accurate translation is, but I'd say the field has come far as you can now hold up your phone to a bunch of text and get real time translation. You can also use an app to get real time speech recognition plus translation.

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

#183

Post by saalweachter »

jandrese wrote: post #172
cpeterso wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ans…

Amazon's "Whatever, here's some products you'll probably buy that are totally unrelated to your search" back-fill has always filled me with rage.

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

#184

Post by jeremyjh »

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 don't remember stale indexes being a problem with AltaVista, its interesting to hear about that. When I switched to Google, it was because I was reliably finding good results within the first few entries. I'd forgotten about it until now, but it used to be a normal thing to page through several screens of search results - performing some kind of human relevance/ranking task on results that were simply too noisy.

From the article:

> This move away from AltaVista’s streamlined search experience made AltaVista more similar to its competitors. Users gradually began to switch to a newcomer, Google, for the simple search they missed.

I don't think this was the case at all. People switched because they got better results.

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

#186

Post by dontbenebby »

octorian wrote: post #70
macintux wrote: post #2

I 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…

> Essentially we all agreed the web was unusable because it was too hard to find what you were looking for Back in those days, I was a fan on the Yahoo! directory approach. The web was still small and explore-able, so a directory actually was useful if you didn't actually know what you were specifically looking for. Meanwhile, if I did know what I was looking for, AltaVista gave me endless pages of random links that…

Yahoo was good for discovery IMHO. Yahoo + webrings + Geocities neighborhoods lead to a fun feeling of exploration I rarely feel nowadays.

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

#187

Post by ddebernardy »

jasode wrote: post #167
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…

>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,…

Not the OP, but I remember the early 2000s. Just spitballing here but IMO that made no difference whatsoever from a consumer's standpoint -- but it presumably did from an operational standpoint, given how Google introduced an actual business model to search. The only things that mattered to you as a consumer then was how good the results were, and how convenient it was to get them. Google had a clear edge by the end of 2000 insofar as I can recollect.

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

#188

Post by autokad »

porpoisely wrote: post #157
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…

I think Google got its big break when yahoo used them and allowed Google to put a 'powered by Google' button. I clicked it and never stopped using google

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

#189

Post by beagle3 »

rspeer wrote: post #149
beagle3 wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 effectiv…

The person you're replying to is clearly aware of search ranking algorithms. You should try looking into the HITS algorithm they mentioned for some additional context.

Well, HITS is applied after you’ve already selected a subset, at response time; so, if you didn’t select s good subset (and AV often didn’t) then picking the most promising out of that subset is not as helpful.

Pagerank is essentially a “universal authority score” (in the HITS terminology), and it worked well because at the tine you didn’t have pages that were authority for one subject and spam for another. You do now - which is why pagerank is now one signal out of 200, even though it was sufficient on its own 20 years ago.

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

#190

Post by zepearl »

carrja99 wrote: post #114
EGreg wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And what was his first company?

Zip2 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zip2

>> Zip2 allowed for two-way communication between users and advertisers. Users could message advertisers and have that message forwarded to their fax machine. Likewise, advertisers could fax users and users could view that fax using specific URLs

Ha, never heard about that - sounds contorted (nowadays) but somehow funny - so somebody in some company was sitting next to a fax waiting for something to come out of it, then when that happened the employee wrote the reply (scribbled on the same or another piece of paper) and faxed back the reply?

I wonder if I would like or hate doing something like that today - waiting for & finally seeing a piece of paper containing an unknown message coming out of a device sounds somehow fascinating... :)

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