281–290 of 323 posts
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A comment below you mentions Verbatim Mode [0]. I haven't tried it yet, but it looks promising. [0] https://searchenginewatch.com/sew/news/2126346/google-introd...
Verbatim mode doesn't do the trick, though. It appears to be essentially the same as quoting your search string.
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 miss NEAR
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…
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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.
9130 webpages agree with you.
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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.
I was in middle or high school, and remember using several different search engines: altavista, lycos, yahoo, dogpile, etc. they all were bulky portals and search results probably weren’t great (that’s why I used so many).
Then one day a friend said “hey have you used google?” I said no, and he showed me.
-it was clean/simple
-the search page (and results) loaded really fast
-the search results must’ve been better as well
-I remember I liked the quirkiness of it too. It felt fun to use Google
From that day on I only remember using Google, until recently given their size, been using Duck Duck Go more often. It’s pretty good for regular search (though maybe 10% queries return some less relevant results than Google) but product search still has a long way to go.
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With your insight, could you say if AV had the same business plan as google? To gather data about people and shape services with it?
Not an insider, but I doubt it; this was the early commercial web, and business plans just weren't that sophisticated. People were building multi-million dollar companies on things that you could write in a long lunch hour today. Honestly, I doubt that was even Google's plan for the first years of its existence. It was more "Hey, we made this neat search thing, let's see if we can figure out a way to make money from…
I don't know if the information is true, but I know I've heard it more than once.
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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…