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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

#291

Post by rayiner »

WalterBright wrote: post #267
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…

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

Apple’s App Store search and Microsoft’s Store’s search seems to be * no matter what you type in.

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

#292

Post by lordgrenville »

rayiner wrote: post #290
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…

There is a verbatim mode?

I assume this refers to encapsulating the entire search text in quotes.

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

#294

Post by nickfromseattle »

therein wrote: post #143
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…

> Also, any AV article which doesn't note that we bought Elon Musk's first company is inherently flawed. ;) Agreed. My previous manager had worked with Elon Musk at Zip2 (maybe even as the CTO). He used to talk about how peculiar Elon is. Does it ring a bell who I might be talking about? :)

I also have a friend who was on the leadership team @ Zip2 and the stories I heard about Elon were hilarious. Unfortunately they remain unpublished, which is a shame, because they are really good.

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

#295

Post by 0xcoffee »

stevekemp wrote: post #272
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.

And they had an amazing forum, I remember learning Photoshop there and reverse engineering with a group called FFF (Does anything remember a guy with the mr clean profile pic, Mr. X i think..?). Then they decided to redesign the forum and everyone left.

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

#296

Post by anticensor »

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…

Why did you not consider promoting the latest supplemental index into being main one and trigger reindexing?

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

#298

Post by usr1106 »

lostgame wrote: post #297
usr1106 wrote: post #293

The link repeatedly gives me nothing but 403 Forbidden You don't have permission to access /about/altavista/ on this server.

Likewise. Since this was live.

Ah, could it be that his site is one of the crazy American sites that deny readers from the EU access because of GDPR? I am in the EU.

Well, I don't think this article is worth finding out.

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

#299

Post by skj »

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…

Defaulting to AND means that you aren't just searching for the most common term in your query that drowns out the rest. Also, adding terms narrows the query down rather than making it more general. This behavior strikes me as far more natural for "normal" people.

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

#300

Post by vivekd »

usr1106 wrote: post #298
lostgame wrote: post #297

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Likewise. Since this was live.

Ah, could it be that his site is one of the crazy American sites that deny readers from the EU access because of GDPR? I am in the EU. Well, I don't think this article is worth finding out.

Canadian here, I'm blocked as well and we don't have GDPR
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