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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

#261

Post by Zenst »

hollerith wrote: post #253
Zenst wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which is kinda ironic given Google was born on the back of a DARPA contract :- https://qz.com/1145669/googles-true-origin-partly-lies-in-ci...

The QZ article says that >In the mid 1990s, . . . from a place that would come to be known as Silicon Valley In the mid 1990s the name Silicon Valley had been used in mainstream media for at least a dozen years.

Very true, cousin worked there in early 80's, probably not best source, but was first that jumped out and common knowledge amongst those old enough and into tech at the time to remember.

Was the aspect how they engaged with government bureaucracy and managed to in effect define a work culture that is so far removed from governmental bureaucracy, that you wonder what the early days was like.

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

#262

Post by beagle3 »

BryantD wrote: post #210
rspeer wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

As much as I value PageRank, it annoys me when people assume it was a novel idea.

It had been applied decades before through scientific paper references, as a measure to improve on the "number of references" metric, which is more easily gamed. References are more rarely circular (only same time in-preparations can form cycles, unlike web pages). I was sitting in a class about stationary processes in 1996 when the lecturer mentioned this (already old and well known at the time) use case as motivation.

Whatever AV implemented at the time, it was not on par.

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

#263

Post by kinkrtyavimoodh »

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 know it's a bit of a fashion here to bash Google but so many Google products still 'spark joy' in my life. Maps, GMail Search, Photos, Translate, Speech Recognition etc.

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

#264

Post by kinkrtyavimoodh »

scarmig wrote: post #250
steelframe wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

There are only three major worldwide English language indexes—Google, Bing and Yandex. For all the praise DDG gets here, it couldn't exist without Bing.

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

#266

Post by jobigoud »

anyfoo wrote: post #212
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…

Although it's very much anecdotical, I, too, distinctly remember that Google defaulted to AND (unlike today, a very hard AND at the time), and that this made a noticeable difference in searching habits. My theory on why this might matter even for people who knew how to use the operators is this: With OR as default, you would first try your query without operators, get page upon page of irrelevant results, and then st…

Back then there was also a distict possibility that there was indeed not a single web page written about a given topic.

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

#267

Post by WalterBright »

anyfoo wrote: post #212
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…

Although it's very much anecdotical, I, too, distinctly remember that Google defaulted to AND (unlike today, a very hard AND at the time), and that this made a noticeable difference in searching habits. My theory on why this might matter even for people who knew how to use the operators is this: With OR as default, you would first try your query without operators, get page upon page of irrelevant results, and then st…

Amazon's search seems to be OR. It isn't very good.

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

#268

Post by luckylion »

groestl wrote: post #222
luckylion wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 br…

Ah, that's interesting and does explain a bit, thank you. Might the perceived quality decrease be based on a misclassification of the user entering the search, and therefore a problematic refinement? I'm thinking similar to Amazon's recommendation engine that for some reason (I'd wager my terribe fashion sense) has decided I'm likely a women and now gets most recommendations completely wrong.

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

#270

Post by simonh »

porpoisely wrote: post #198
autokad wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

I'm not happy about everything Google does, but I don't actually feel worse off. I use their search dozens of times a day, I rely on GMail and Google Maps, Google Docs is fantastic. It's hard sell to convince me that I am worse off due to the existence and my use of Google products.
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