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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

#241

Post by CharlesColeman »

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…

Does that happen for words that aren't likely stopwords?

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

#243

Post by teddyh »

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…

> but that mostly just leads to "if your answer isn't on the first page, it's not going to be on the second or the hundredth".

Relevant xkcd about the “second page of Google results” effect:

https://xkcd.com/1334/

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

#244

Post by taneq »

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…

Also, it was fast. AltaVista took several seconds to load. Google was near-instant.

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

#245

Post by coldtea »

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…

>Eh, not actually unique to Google. Remember that Jon Kleinberg was developing HITS in parallel -- AV was well aware of the concept of measuring page importance using incoming links, and we had our own implementation.

And the guy who started Baidu (the Google of China), Robin Li, had created his similar to PageRank algorithm, and even patented it in the US, before Google (he filled for the patent in 1997, Google was founded in 1998).

However, Kaiser Kuo points out that Robin Li, the co-founder of Baidu, obtained a patent for hypertext link analysis before Larry Page obtained his “Page Rank” version.

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

#246

Post by lenocinor »

d35007 wrote: post #35
SmellyGeekBoy wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

warez

Yeah but is it pronounced like "wares" or like "Juarez"?

I used to hear both pretty regularly, talking to BBS folks back in the day. Thankfully, nobody really seemed to fight about it like the pronunciation of "GIF"...

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

#247

Post by nmstoker »

rusk wrote: post #88

Altavista were also the first ones doing online translation. babelfish.altavista.com, anyone remember that? The Babelfish being Douglas Adams' fictional fish that you stuck in your ear to use as a universal translator. there was also a fake domain called alta-vista.com that was very much of the goatse variety.

Yes, it was like magic when you first saw it.

I was delighted to discover that the translations weren't always symmetrical, with the best example being going from English to German then back to English with:

"I'm going to kick your ass"

-->

"I will step on your donkey"

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

#248

Post by Umofomia »

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…

I don't know whether this is necessarily the cause of your issue, but I discovered one reason why it doesn't always work. On mobile Safari, iOS ends up inserting smart quote characters rather than straight quotes when you type them. Google ends up ignoring the smart quote characters. To work around this, I have to hold down the " button to explicitly make the keyboard insert the straight quote character.

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

#250

Post by scarmig »

steelframe wrote: post #108
siggen wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I fear all we have now is anecdotal evidence. :-) In my case, it was a gradual conversion to Google from Altavista than something immediate. So, funny thing: Back then, if one search engine didn't have what you were looking for, you would try another. Now, if Google doesn't have what you are looking for, where do you go? Does it mean the answer does not exist on the Internet? Do you try Bing or Duck?

Duck is Bing. https://www.quora.com/How-is-the-Bing-API-used-by-DuckDuckGo There are effectively only two competitive search engines in the U.S. and European markets today. In those markets, Bing is the only market pressure keeping Google honest.

DDG is just a whitelabeled Bing? That's interesting.
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