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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

#301

Post by sumedh »

cortesoft wrote: post #256
CharlesColeman wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. Google really needs to develop a "pro mode" search engine that works for this use case. I get…

"Google really needs to" in the sense that it would be useful, or that it would be a good investment for them? Sure it can afford to do it, but how would it help them make more money?

> Sure it can afford to do it, but how would it help them make more money? reply

It keeps the power users on the site so they wont have to look for an alternative. Power users if they find something better might influence no power users to the other site

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

#302

Post by xtat »

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…

Fascinating reply ^^ it seems with every corporate story there's the memorable story people took away and the thing that actually happened

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

#303

Post by nkurz »

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?

Yes, easily discoverable from the links under the search box as Tools -> All Results -> Verbatim. Ignore the sign about the leopard, I think that's just left over from some other project.

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

#304

Post by takeda »

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)

> 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.

I wasn't aware about index back then, but I saw broken links, at that time I thought that was normal, that it takes time to scan the entire Internet. With Google I generally got working websites.

I did like the boolean search in AV, it helped with obscure searches, especially when name was similar to a typo of a popular word.

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

#305

Post by unilynx »

ramraj07 wrote: post #280
Noumenon72 wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Only installed it because it was the easiest way to look up a page's pagerank.

Surprised that it still exists! https://www.google.com/intl/nl/toolbar/ie/index.html - and the screenshot even seems to show a "share to google+" :)

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

#306

Post by fencepost »

Thoreandan wrote: post #202
fencepost wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Internet Archive stopped honoring robots.txt back in 2017 because "Robots.txt meant for search engines don’t work well for web archives" Not sure without a bit more digging whether they honor explicit rules for their crawler. Edit: (but a little looking at comments indicates that they don't, and notes that ia_archiver is Alexa, not the Internet Archive)

Hmmm, and their robots.txt seems to not be at fault. I wonder if they excluded it to not overlap with Alta Vista, still it's tragic that digital.com isn't browsable in the wayback machine.

This may be a question of age. DEC was acquired by Compaq in 1998, then the IA was only a couple years old.

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

#307

Post by grkvlt »

skj wrote: post #299
grkvlt wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

sure, i agree, except that they also apply this 'narrowing down' logic when insufficient or no results are returned, thinking the query needs to be more specific in order to work. i have observed the following sort of behaviour:

    1. entering 'invisible marmalade teapot' and getting no results
    2. changing to 'invisible marmalade teapot with tartan cosy', again nothing
    3. so 'invisible marmalade teapot with tartan cosy in outer space', ditto
you get the idea...? it's just like in the real world, when you might go to a bookshop and say

    You: do you have that new crime novel in stock?
    Bookseller: er, i don't know which one you mean?
    Y: the new crime novel by john grisham, pelican something or other?
    B: oh, right, yes, here it is!
and everyone is happy.

default OR in a search engine would mean my first example eventually starting to return results about transparent space coffee pots with tartan cosies, ignoring the first few terms but the rest match, which is often helpful, particularly if you're doing an exploratory search for something where you aren't sure of the exact details.

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

#308

Post by thequux »

BryantD wrote: post #211
jasode wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>one of the primary reasons for AV's demise -- we didn't update our primary index for several months just as Google [...] I'd say that our failure to maintain a high quality index was directly caused by our loss of focus, Do you believe Google's strategic decision to use commodity computers and hard drives gave them any competitive advantage (cheaper cost, scaling, etc) compared to DEC Alpha servers? As an outsider,…

Nah. We weren't using that many servers. Today, that absolutely would make a difference. Back in the day we could run a top ten web site on well under 500 servers, and it's not like we were paying list price for Alphas anyhow.

Years ago, I was told by a drunk* ex-Digital engineer at a lisp meetup that one of the big reasons that Alpha died was that y'all were getting yields of something like 6 wafers/chip, vs. Intel's 97% for the Pentium. Given that, those 500 alphas still must have cost a pretty penny to produce.

* I was also not exactly sober at the time, so these numbers may be a bit off. The number of wafers per chip being greater than 1, though, I am absolutely certain about.

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

#309

Post by asdff »

Nelson69 wrote: post #121
erikig wrote: post #53

"...AltaVista was essentially a test case for one of Digital’s supercomputers, the AlphaServer 8400 TurboLaser." I loved the seeming technical excesses of Digital so much. Nothing they did seemed as calm and staid as Cray, Sun or even SGI. Think about that name - Alpha Server 8400 Turbo Laser

The "8400" part almost seems arbitrary to the rest of the name

Everyone still names their crap like this. "Dell Optiplex 7010" or "Nvidia GeForce GTX 1060 GTI RTX ETC ETC" gives me absolutely zero information about the product other than what to google.

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

#310

Post by skj »

grkvlt wrote: post #307
skj wrote: post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

sure, i agree, except that they also apply this 'narrowing down' logic when insufficient or no results are returned, thinking the query needs to be more specific in order to work. i have observed the following sort of behaviour: 1. entering 'invisible marmalade teapot' and getting no results 2. changing to 'invisible marmalade teapot with tartan cosy', again nothing 3. so 'invisible marmalade teapot with tartan cosy…

`eventually starting to return results about transparent space coffee pots with tartan cosies ... which is often helpful`

I don't find your examples compelling.

If you want to do an additional search that does not depend on your first terms, you simply bring up a new search window.

In your 'real world' example, the equivalent search queries would go something like

search: new crime novel

result: way way too much stuff

search: new crime novel john grisham pelican

result: exactly the right book because every one of those terms applies

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