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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

#221

Post by scarface74 »

davesque wrote: post #146
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…

I do seem to recall AV getting flooded with spam --- porn spam to be exact. I remember myself and all the nerd kids in my high school computer lab would joke that you could search for something completely innocuous like "yarn" and always get back at least a couple of porn links. This of course was also at a time when "whitehouse.com" was a porn site.

It might have been funny if you were in school, but if you were at work that’s a different story.

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

#222

Post by groestl »

luckylion wrote: post #170
groestl wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's also that after bootstrapping with text search and page rank, they can incorporate a lot more useful signals in there ranking algorithm: the clickstream on the search results, and page visit time after the click. If the majority of their user base would actually want precise search, this clickstream would not reorder the results, but it does. So most users are happier with imprecise ranking. The wealth of user t…

Idk, from what I've seen, page rank is still the super major factor that's responsible for 90%+ percent. I work for a few large affiliate projects. Renting subdirs on high-link-count-sites = instant top 3 for anything, even the most competitive keys, even when it's totally unrelated to the site's other content. The whole "we have more than 200 factors" seems like mostly hot air to me personally.

It's not necessarily about ranking sites which actually contain the key, or which google already decided should be relevant to the search (where page rank seems to be the most relevant factor, thanks for your interesting data point!).

When Google receives a search query, it first broadens the search phrase (see [0]). The user's clickstream and search refinements are helpful in both training the model for doing the broadening, and then weighting the search contexts, for narrowing down what should actually be displayed on the front pages.

[0] https://www.link-assistant.com/news/keyword-refinements.html

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

#223

Post by reaperducer »

zepearl wrote: post #190
carrja99 wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, t…

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... :)

Just get a job at any restaurant in Japan. Fax is the way nearly all to-go orders are placed. Fax machines are still massively popular there.

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

#224

Post by reaperducer »

mda wrote: post #169
tannhaeuser wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Google knows better than you" gives way too much credit IMHO. Google Search is nearly useless for my most searched topics today, and even dangerous in that it gives you a very wrong perception of what is out there.

Any examples? I find it hard to believe it is "nearly useless for most searched topics". It is easy to check, go to your search history and look at your last 10-20 queries and count how many them useless.

Today I searched for TPUG, which is the Toronto PET Users Group.

Google returned exactly ZERO results about TPUG. All of the results were about dogs.

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

#225

Post by anyfoo »

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…

Click on "Tools" on the results page, then "Verbatim". It's annoying, but it works.

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

#226

Post by smileypete »

0xADEADBEE wrote: post #154
acranox wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know gmail is different than search, but if you do a quoted search for a string in gmail that has zero matches, it will return a few "close" matches. This really confused me, because I was trying to find something specific, and it found a few emails, so I read them, and then was confused that they didn't actually take about the specific thing I was trying to remember. Then I realized that they I included one of the…

I try to wean myself off Google search every few months but I've never managed to stick. What do you like for an alternative? I'm probably due another attempt.

I just added www.google.com###main to my uBlock filters, to remind me about falling down googling inspired rabbit holes :)

I either use duckduckgo or google in another browser that I don't normally use.

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

#227

Post by ben_w »

pedrocx486 wrote: post #175
ben_w wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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/

The “(?)” is because I’m only 85% sure that was the Google product they were unhappy about.

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

#228

Post by sah2ed »

sct202 wrote: post #38

I remember having to use all those meta search engines that combined the results of several engines together to average out all the trash of each result set, and then Google appeared and was better than that.

Wrt meta search engines, I can only recollect Vivisimo, though there were quite a number of them at that time.

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

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

#229

Post by kirion25 »

classichasclass wrote: post #21
brobdingnagians wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

A mirror of the archive still exists: https://dmoztools.net/

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

#230

Post by smileypete »

UncleSlacky wrote: post #180
ArrayList wrote: post #137

I miss HotBot. Anyone remember that?

That was probably the best single engine before Google. Around the same time, I also used the meta-search site dogpile.com - which still exists.

Surprised no-one has mentioned metacrawler so far:

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

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