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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

#31

Post by siggen »

baldfat wrote: post #16
siggen wrote: post #9

If I remember correctly, Altavista produced better results than Google back then, for me at least. However, Altavista took seconds to load the first page (on 56k) whereas Google's first page loaded almost immediately. I honestly didn't expect Google to have survived the dot-com bust back then. This was before they figured out online adword auctions.

Google was immediately better then anything else from day one. Google was launched in Fall of 1997. In January 98 is when I started using it and it was hands down better then crawlers or any other search engine.

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?

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

#32

Post by sucrose »

adsadadsad wrote: post #4

Altavisa and astalavista for years! Astalavista was for your all your serialz, crackz and porn passwords back in the day of http basic auth and 56.6k modems

Astalavista! Reminds me of warez listings and downloading Photoshop for days.

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

#33

Post by itp »

afandian wrote: post #27
spudlyo wrote: post #18

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'm nostagic for precise search, but I wonder how it would have fared with the scale we have now. (Edit: scale and diversity of input data but also audiences) Google regularly fails to include all words I searched (even if it's only three or four), often retrieving completely useless results. I doubt it's due to incompetence; I take it as a signal that they're now struggling to match the volume and characteristics of…

I suspect it's a reflection of the way the majority of their audience interacts with search.

For a large number of people, Google's ability to answer the underlying question, rather than explicitly identify pages where all search terms appear, means it works better. If you think of Google as a way to get answers, this is good.

If you think of Google as a search engine, and particularly if you have historical experience with (and expectations of) search engines, this is very frustrating. And the workarounds of clicking the "must contain" link (or surrounding all of your search terms with quotation marks) are a seemingly unnecessary inconvenience.

As a personal anecdote, I was an early adopter of smartphones (particularly relative to a non-technical audience). So I was excited when I could speak to my phone, then disappointed when I discovered that I had to structure my queries and instructions very carefully.

A few years ago I was on a road trip with a very non-technical friend. We decided to stop for Chipotle. Had it been up to me, I would probably have pulled out my phone, opened Google Assistant (or perhaps Maps directly), and told my phone (speaking as clearly as possible) "navigate to the closest Chipotle" or something similar.

But I was driving, so she just pulled out her iPhone and half-shouted "I want a burrito!" at it. And that worked just fine.

Point being, I had expectations for how things should work based on interactions with earlier iterations of an interface. She didn't.

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

#35

Post by d35007 »

SmellyGeekBoy wrote: post #28
adsadadsad wrote: post #4

Altavisa and astalavista for years! Astalavista was for your all your serialz, crackz and porn passwords back in the day of http basic auth and 56.6k modems

warez

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

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

#37

Post by icedchai »

Thoreandan wrote: post #11

... and in 2019 the "digital.com" domain is apparently hosted by a site that can't handle the traffic of this article. SPECIAL BONUS: Their current robots.txt appears to be blocking the old Digital.com pages from the WayBack machine. Argh.

I still can't believe HP actually sold digital.com DEC / Digital is a huge part of computing history: PDP, VAX, Alpha.

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

#39

Post by luckylion »

afandian wrote: post #27
spudlyo wrote: post #18

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'm nostagic for precise search, but I wonder how it would have fared with the scale we have now. (Edit: scale and diversity of input data but also audiences) Google regularly fails to include all words I searched (even if it's only three or four), often retrieving completely useless results. I doubt it's due to incompetence; I take it as a signal that they're now struggling to match the volume and characteristics of…

Interesting idea.

I figured it was due to the user base of 2019 being very different than that of 2010, and Google adapting to the fact that most of their users aren't technology literate and cannot formulate clear search queries, so they just try to guess what might be of interest to them.

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

#40

Post by adsadadsad »

sucrose wrote: post #32
adsadadsad wrote: post #4

Altavisa and astalavista for years! Astalavista was for your all your serialz, crackz and porn passwords back in the day of http basic auth and 56.6k modems

Astalavista! Reminds me of warez listings and downloading Photoshop for days.

After clicking through 10 ppc links to porn sites to unlock the real redirect
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