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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

#191

Post by JoeSmithson »

0xADEADBEE wrote: post #152
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?

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 diffe…

Are you saying that it was returning pages that didn't contain the phrase "the onion", or just weren't articles from The Onion? What was the exact search term?

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

#192

Post by reificator »

JadeNB wrote: post #151
reificator wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

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.

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

#193

Post by jasode »

ddebernardy wrote: post #187
jasode wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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…

>but IMO that made no difference whatsoever from a consumer's standpoint.

With cheaper techniques, the idea is that the "more capital efficient" way of indexing the ever-expanding web would in turn provide better results for an improved consumer experience. It's the old adage of "do more with less".

For example, see the old Danny Sullivan graphs[0] showing how Google's index was growing faster than AltaVista. Having a bigger index lets one return more relevant search hits.

AltaVista wasn't just falling behind in "staleness" of old indexes; the aggregate size of the index was smaller than Google as well.

[0] https://searchenginewatch.com/sew/study/2068075/search-engin...

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

#194

Post by gojomo »

As I vaguely recall, from my own perceptions as web search was arriving:

* There were a bunch of early "full-text"-ish search experiments, but Lycos best proved its immense value and potential first.

* Then, AltaVista arrived with breadth & speed beyond what had previously been possible. Still, it required a bit of expertise to craft your queries.

* Then, Excite burst ahead with a quality breakthrough. Something about their use of HTML-styling & in-link text meant that even with fewer sites, the results were much better.

* Then, Hotbot (powered by Inktomi) had an era of best mix of fresh-content, deep-content, and quality ranking.

* Then, all those pioneers dropped the ball, in one way or another, letting Google out-rank, out-crawl, and out-business-model them. (And much of Google's business-model was pioneered by "Goto", later "Overture".) Sad, really, especially how many coulda-shoulda competitors eventually died inside Yahoo. (Including Overture.)

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

#195

Post by groestl »

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…

We had a really slow internet connection at school. So when one of my colleagues introduced us to Google with it's clean interface, we all moved over from a handful of other search engines, and never went back. I can't remember the index being a problem back then.

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

#196

Post by JadeNB »

reificator wrote: post #192
JadeNB wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> > 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.

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 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 see; I incorrectly read it as accusatory. Thanks for the very civil reply!

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

#197

Post by samstave »

autokad wrote: post #188
porpoisely wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

IT was responsible for setting thousands of machines default pages to Google through all our system images from an IT Desktop support perspective - this was because Yahoo's frontpage was an utter hideous mess - and it was the minimalistic portal to the internet that worked way better for the users in the companies I worked at then.

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

#198

Post by porpoisely »

autokad wrote: post #188
porpoisely wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Absolutely that helped in gaining a wider audience. But I suspect the reason yahoo chose google was because all their tech people preferred google because they all used it to search for code. Maybe it's my high school or my college, but google won over the CS crowd very quickly. Their clean interface and their ability to get the code we were searching for to help us with our homework really gave them a leg up.

Then their gmail ( especially the initial invite and storage ) and chrome made google the "cool" tech company and pretty much cemented their place in the tech world. Sadly, they've turned out to be monsters rather than saints and we are all the worse off for it.

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