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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

#21

Post by classichasclass »

brobdingnagians wrote: post #19
cm2187 wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For a long time I used yahoo. The nice thing with a directory is that if you found an interesting website you could look up similar websites in the same yahoo category. I think this functionality is just gone.

Are there any sites with a "crowdsourced" directory? Might be interesting to have something like wiki-pedia that is a curated source, but curated by a larger group of volunteers. Although, I could see it getting corrupted by marketing purposes, but at the same time it might be able to be maintained cheaply by a foundation. Human intelligence providing grouped sites might be a useful asset, and there could be statisti…

There used to be dmoz.org, r.i.p. It doesn't seem to be working anymore, but it used to at least have an archive.

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

#22

Post by myself248 »

spudlyo wrote: post #18

What I miss most about Altavista was the boolean search operators, and being able to reliably insist that words either must or must not appear in the results with the + and - characters. With Google these operators are seemingly just hints that it feels free to ignore. +noir +film -"pinot noir"

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

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

#23

Post by [deleted] »

cm2187 wrote: post #15
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…

For a long time I used yahoo. The nice thing with a directory is that if you found an interesting website you could look up similar websites in the same yahoo category. I think this functionality is just gone.

[deleted]

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

#24

Post by sevensor »

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…

I think I switched from Hotbot to Google around 2000, maybe 2001. I told everybody I knew about the fantastic new search engine. Their plucky upstart vibe made them seem like they were carrying forward the spirit of the internet back then, before they ate the internet.

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

#25

Post by leeoniya »

spudlyo wrote: post #18

What I miss most about Altavista was the boolean search operators, and being able to reliably insist that words either must or must not appear in the results with the + and - characters. With Google these operators are seemingly just hints that it feels free to ignore. +noir +film -"pinot noir"

i miss NEAR

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

#26

Post by vladd »

brobdingnagians wrote: post #19
cm2187 wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For a long time I used yahoo. The nice thing with a directory is that if you found an interesting website you could look up similar websites in the same yahoo category. I think this functionality is just gone.

Are there any sites with a "crowdsourced" directory? Might be interesting to have something like wiki-pedia that is a curated source, but curated by a larger group of volunteers. Although, I could see it getting corrupted by marketing purposes, but at the same time it might be able to be maintained cheaply by a foundation. Human intelligence providing grouped sites might be a useful asset, and there could be statisti…

You can check-out http://www.curlie.org/ , which is the successor of DMoz, the volunteer-powered now-defunct Directory of Mozilla project.

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

#27

Post by afandian »

spudlyo wrote: post #18

What I miss most about Altavista was the boolean search operators, and being able to reliably insist that words either must or must not appear in the results with the + and - characters. With Google these operators are seemingly just hints that it feels free to ignore. +noir +film -"pinot noir"

I'm nostagic for precise search, but I wonder how it would have fared with the scale we have now.

(Edit: scale and diversity of input data but also audiences)

Google regularly fails to include all words I searched (even if it's only three or four), often retrieving completely useless results. I doubt it's due to incompetence; I take it as a signal that they're now struggling to match the volume and characteristics of the data they have to ingest to an adequate user experience.

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

#29

Post by astazangasta »

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…

Yeah, I had the same history. Google worked better than keyword search because the web was young and naive and not built by evil spammers yet, and people had not figured out how to game PageRank. That lasted a few years. Now it is mush again.

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

#30

Post by bwb »

ocdtrekkie wrote: post #13
wil421 wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you think Google is the new AOL? Way back AOL had their homepage where you saw an AOL recommended part of the web. You still had access to the web but for most first time users it was easier to use than a web browser alone. I say this because I’ve been wondering if we now have a Google snapshot of the web instead of AOLs homepage. Don’t get me wrong search is much better than a more or less static homepage of topi…

One of those "Google is the new AOL" moments hit me when I heard a commercial for Google on the radio recently. Specifically, it was someone explaining that they had a feature built especially for veterans to find jobs relevant to them, and that you could get to it by typing "jobs for veterans" into Google search. It just sounded so much like the old AOL Keyword feature, which a lot of people forgot about, but was li…

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?
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