Altavista: The rise and fall of the biggest pre-Google search engine • Hacker News Board

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

#201

Post by gp2000 » Fri, Feb 15, 2019, 8:00 PM UTC

Although it is a historical (and disavowed) footnote, the Open Text Index launched in April 1995 and sported full text indexing of web pages -- more than 6 months before Alta Vista's launch in December that year.

It did serve as a back-end search for Yahoo! though it never could keep up with the full query volume. It was lambasted by the creators of Google for experimenting with putting clearly-marked ads in search results. That transgression looks hilariously quaint to modern eyes.

https://www.referenceforbusiness.com/history2/72/Open-Text-C...

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

#202

Post by Thoreandan » Fri, Feb 15, 2019, 8:01 PM UTC

fencepost wrote: post #56

Thoreandan wrote: post #11

... and in 2019 the "digital.com" domain is apparently hosted by a site that can't handle the traffic of this article. SPECIAL BONUS: Their current robots.txt appears to be blocking the old Digital.com pages from the WayBack machine. Argh.

The Internet Archive stopped honoring robots.txt back in 2017 because "Robots.txt meant for search engines don’t work well for web archives" Not sure without a bit more digging whether they honor explicit rules for their crawler. Edit: (but a little looking at comments indicates that they don't, and notes that ia_archiver is Alexa, not the Internet Archive)

Hmmm, and their robots.txt seems to not be at fault. I wonder if they excluded it to not overlap with Alta Vista, still it's tragic that digital.com isn't browsable in the wayback machine.

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

#203

Post by welly » Fri, Feb 15, 2019, 8:02 PM UTC

agumonkey wrote: post #10

adsadadsad wrote: post #4

Altavisa and astalavista for years! Astalavista was for your all your serialz, crackz and porn passwords back in the day of http basic auth and 56.6k modems

it's spelled cerealz

Serialbox?

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

#204

Post by BryantD » Fri, Feb 15, 2019, 8:03 PM UTC

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 can't remember one way or another but I think you're right about the importance of the defaults.

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

#205

Post by BryantD » Fri, Feb 15, 2019, 8:03 PM UTC

reificator wrote: post #140

BryantD wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> 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.

No offense taken!

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

#206

Post by guiambros » Fri, Feb 15, 2019, 8:04 PM UTC

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…

I had an ISP at the time, and remember teaching users to always search on AV using "keyword1 AND keyword2", to get the results they expected. When Google came around, this became unnecessary.

IMO this was one of the biggest contributors to the perceived quality advantage of Google vs AV.

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

#207

Post by rsync » Fri, Feb 15, 2019, 8:06 PM UTC

afandian wrote: post #27

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…

"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."

That is awfully generous of you ...

Google shows us what it shows us to maximize advertising revenue. They need you to keep clicking and generate hits on adwords-encumbered websites. Showing you zero (or one or a handful of) results for your search query is counter to this goal.

Showing you a batch of results with no adwords-encumbered sites in it is also counter to this goal.

I don't think they're struggling with anything at all - they are optimizing for paid clicks and precise search results is, at best, a very distant second priority...

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

#208

Post by crispytx » Fri, Feb 15, 2019, 8:06 PM UTC

I use to be an Altavista user. In Middle School one of my teachers showed us Google in the computer lab and I've been using it ever since. What I remember standing out at the time was Google's UI; it was just a logo, a text input, and two buttons. I thought that was neat and just kept using it after that. The search results may have been better, but that wasn't why I made the switch.

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

#209

Post by dukoid » Fri, Feb 15, 2019, 8:07 PM UTC

saalweachter wrote: post #183

jandrese wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

At least there it's obvious... If you search for a product with a specific feature you are easily screwed without noticing until later... :(

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

#210

Post by BryantD » Fri, Feb 15, 2019, 8:09 PM UTC

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.

To be fair, I'm an ops guy, not a search engineer. ;) It's valid to say AV might not have implemented the basic concepts as well and I don't want to devalue Google's innovation. It just annoys me when people assume PageRank was a unicorn and nobody else was doing anything similar.