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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

#271

Post by systemBuilder »

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…

Alta Vista defaulted to AND. Crappy search engines like Excite defaulted to OR because it's easier to serve up a lot of low quality results in an OR search. Moreover Alta Vista had "NEAR" which made it unique among search engines.

It always took 2 to 5 searches using Altavista to get the results you were looking for. This was a huge improvement on Excite and Lycos which might produce infinite results with absolutely nothing relevant. There was a lot of noise like source code archives. With Google search the first page usually had a useful result.

Probably the biggest thing that destroyed Alta Vista was the horrible flashing banner Ads at the top of the screen.

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

#272

Post by stevekemp »

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.

There was also astalavista which hosted crackz, key-generators, and similar things.

The name always amused me, partly as a homage to the Terminator franchise, and partly Altavista.

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

#273

Post by james_s_tayler »

emmelaich wrote: post #252
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…

My recollection was that as soon as anyone - but especially techies - tried Google even once they never went back. The lack of fresh index surely was a factor but not sure whether it was primary. Obvious question - why did you not update the index? Was it that it was obvious Google was going to win and made people give up? (edit - never mind - you address this in other comments)

I was like 11 at the time. My IT teacher taught it to us in class. I still remember it. Never went back.

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

#274

Post by sethammons »

jobigoud wrote: post #266
anyfoo wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Reminds me of a Google Whack: a two word query that returned exactly one result. Mine was zoomorphic kazoos. Those days are gone.

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

#275

Post by sethammons »

jeremyjh wrote: post #184
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 don't remember stale indexes being a problem with AltaVista, its interesting to hear about that. When I switched to Google, it was because I was reliably finding good results within the first few entries. I'd forgotten about it until now, but it used to be a normal thing to page through several screens of search results - performing some kind of human relevance/ranking task on results that were simply too noisy. Fr…

This was my experience too. Simply better results on the first or (rarely) second page. Also the clean ui. Just an image and a search box. Fantastic on a slow connection.

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

#276

Post by sfcguyus »

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…

Nah mate. Used AltaVista. The switchover had nothing to do with 404s or 'freshness'. Google was just easier in that day. You'd assume it was something technical that you could have altered but from a user perspective I highly doubt it had much relevance.

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

#277

Post by jgalt212 »

m-p-3 wrote: post #63

The website seems to be struggling, I pinned it on my IPFS node using 2read.net https://ipfs.io/ipfs/QmQXeXmMMVfPL9Syqgkoo8zLf6noGrSnGFbnetL... If other IPFS users wants to pin that to distribute the load, that'd be great.

thanks, worked for me.

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

#278

Post by ramraj07 »

grkvlt wrote: post #259
anyfoo wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The problem with AND as a default is that 'normal' people (i.e. people who have no idea what boolean means) operate search engines something like this: 1. type some words in, and get no or incorrect results; 2. add some extra words, and repeat the search, with the idea they are making the search more specific; 3. be confused as to why they still don't get the results they want. a default of OR, on the other hand, mea…

As someone old enough to have used search engines extensively myself and watching over others using it during the AV - Google transition, I can definitely say that defaulting to AND was one of the most important reasons Google appeared to give better results than AV for both advanced and basic folk.

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

#279

Post by jgalt212 »

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.

and yet ensemble methods seem to win an overwhelming proportion of the kaggle competitions and the netflix prize.

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

#280

Post by ramraj07 »

Noumenon72 wrote: post #257
gwbas1c wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wouldn't say it was just the index issue that allowed Google to take prominence. It was the browser toolbar that really killed AltaVista. I didn't know anything about Google until mid 2000, and when I used it, I just thought it was an AltaVista clone. Fast forward to fall 2000, and once after getting bad results on AltaVista, I tried Google again. At the time, I never bookmarked either of the sites or set them as m…

I was expecting you to say Google won because it didn't put out one of those adware toolbars crowding your browser. I would never install one of those. I just put Google as my home page.

Times were different back then. And unlike other toolbars I distinctly remember Google's toolbar being actually useful and worth the space.
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