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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

#311

Post by yesenadam »

lordgrenville wrote: post #292
rayiner wrote: post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a verbatim mode?

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

No, it refers to verbatim mode, which ensures every word in the search is on (almost) every page found. (You would think google works like this by default, but in practise, very far from it) Using quotes around the search terms ensure they appear in the quoted order.

To switch on Verbatim, I click "Verbatim" on the left side of the google page, it appears just under the alternative, "All results". I think for other systems it can be well hidden in menus. I use it almost every time I google anything. Otherwise you get a load of irrelevant crap.

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

#313

Post by glenrivard »

kinkrtyavimoodh wrote: post #263
macintux wrote: post #2

I recall a dinner party where a few people were discussing the web, probably 1994. Essentially we all agreed the web was unusable because it was too hard to find what you were looking for; the best ideas we had for solving that problem were pretty bad. Google changed the world. What used to be buried on the 3rd or 4th page of Altavista results, if it appeared at all, was suddenly front and center. (Yahoo’s directory…

I know it's a bit of a fashion here to bash Google but so many Google products still 'spark joy' in my life. Maps, GMail Search, Photos, Translate, Speech Recognition etc.

Would put YouTube TV also on that list. Just a much better UX and cheaper t boot.

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

#314

Post by grkvlt »

skj wrote: post #310
grkvlt wrote: post #307

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 stuf…

Hm. I think perhaps a better way of putting it is that the hard AND issue is when people search using a natural language type query (I know about stop words, assume these are always filtered out) and include some extraneous term, so 'What is that new crime novel by John Grisham about a Penguin I think?' will return nothing, and no amount of extra terms added at the end will help, until you delete 'Penguin'... Of course it's anecdotal, but I still suspect it's one of the reasons for the hard AND to OR switch...

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

#315

Post by sytelus »

jandrese wrote: post #172
cpeterso wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I've long believed that default OR in keyword searches is always a mistake, and the default should always be AND. The reason being you can just search twice if you want either word, but in the vast majority of cases you want both words when you enter them in the searchbox. Most companies kind of split the difference and put the AND results first then fill in with OR results, but that mostly just leads to "if your ans…

It’s not always a mistake. The OR or AND just provides initial filter and then you get to rank pages and take top N. If your ranking algorithm put a lot of weight on the fact that all words exist then you can get same result as AND but with benefit that if no page exist then you may suggest something. It also depends on how you present these results.

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

#316

Post by sytelus »

autokad wrote: post #188
porpoisely wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suppose that could be one of the reasons, but I believe the main reason was google won over CS students in high school and college in the late 90s and early 00s. I was introduced to google in high school because it was the best search engine for looking up programming code for my CS classes. Better than altavista, excite, etc. And naturally the word spread, not to mention the people maintaining computers, labs, etc…

I think Google got its big break when yahoo used them and allowed Google to put a 'powered by Google' button. I clicked it and never stopped using google

Yahoo advertising for Google on their front page is almost similar to another such rare extremely lucky break when IBM advertised for Microsoft in its all glory. Behind every billion dollar company there is an event that had one in billion chance of happening.

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

#317

Post by sytelus »

dougb5 wrote: post #217
gojomo wrote: post #194

As I vaguely recall, from my own perceptions as web search was arriving: * There were a bunch of early "full-text"-ish search experiments, but Lycos best proved its immense value and potential first. * Then, AltaVista arrived with breadth & speed beyond what had previously been possible. Still, it required a bit of expertise to craft your queries. * Then, Excite burst ahead with a quality breakthrough. Something abou…

This is right on. To add some color from my memory as a Lycos employee, it felt that many of the early search engines dropped by the ball in their rush become "portals". There was this mass delusion that it was important to hold the user's attention as long as possible in order to serve more ads--to own or otherwise control the content that users ultimately ended up at. Web search itself was seen as a commodity. This…

I had say 2000 buble bursting also played part. It was easier to survive for a nimble startup and hard for behemoth with huge employee count and little revenues. I wonder if that didn’t happened then if we would have more competition in this space.

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

#318

Post by sytelus »

joelberman wrote: post #287

DEC wanted to sell Alphaservers (and VMS). Altavista was a great demonstration of scale and speed and distributed computing (versus a giant mainframe). Crawling and indexing speed. Tons of open ip connections, security,etc were all selling points. Bring large customers to see the physical Altavista and also the ip exchange helped sell lots of systems. DEC was a hardware company. Google wasn’t. Made a lot of differenc…

So DEC missed out on IBM PC revolution, Microsoft DOS and now search engines!

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

#319

Post by sytelus »

akirby wrote: post #163

DEC was based in Maynard, MA not CA. We had a couple excellent teams in the Bay area that were acquired from Xerox as I recall. The Systems Research Center in Palo Alto and WRL. AltaVista was not the only business that DEC failed to capitalize on. We had an $800M networking business when Cisco was just starting. DEC defunded that business to invest more in other projects. We had a storage server business that we sold…

Number of things DEC missed out on: personal computer, DOS, search engine, networking, storage.

How can something having so much lead keep missing out on so big? What they could have done differently?

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

#320

Post by sytelus »

glaberficken wrote: post #109

As a European early adopter I still remember the day i switched from recommending Altavista to all my friends and family to Google. Speed was definitely not the reason. It was purely about the usefulness of the results. There was just a point in time where Google surpassed everyone else in relevance of the 1st page of results, and there was no going back.

Do you remember the year this happened for you?
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