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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

#51

Post by ben_w »

myself248 wrote: post #22
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"

And the ability to do case-sensitive search. "DoS" != "DOS"

I’ve seen academics upset that Google insisted on changing their search term from “adsorb” to “absorb”. Apparently Google Scholar (?) couldn’t be forced the way Google.com could be.

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

#52

Post by entity345 »

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.

> However, Altavista took seconds to load the first page (on 56k) whereas Google's first page loaded almost immediately.

That's why I moved from Altavista to Google. Google had a minimalist homepage and results page which were focussed and loaded very quickly compared to the bloated pages (for the time) of Altavista and Yahoo.

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

#53

Post by erikig »

"...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

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

#54

Post by diegocg »

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"

Have you tried searching with verbatim mode? Without Verbatim mode, Google will try to be smart, eg match car when you search automotive, making spelling corrections, etc. Also, keep in mind that google removed the + operator, but you can achieve the same results using double quotation.

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

#56

Post by fencepost »

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.

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)

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

#57

Post by taf2 »

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"

yeah... i also miss trying to locate the search box and search results...

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/BzmnXJICYAEGqQ7.jpg

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

#58

Post by philliphaydon »

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 think I started using the internet in 1997, and used Altavista because the results were better than Google. Wasn't until ~2000 that I began to find results on Google faster than Altavista.

It was probably subjective but IMO google wasn't better initially, but it did end up being the best. Even tho I use bing or ddg, Google still has the best search engine.

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

#59

Post by abruzzi »

itp wrote: post #33
afandian wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 experien…

While there is some truth that we are trained by the search paradigm we learned on, Google has a habit of ignoring key parts of my query just to show results. If I search for something like: spotmatic f schematic (which I did just recently), I don't want it to ignore "schematic" just because there are no matching results. It is far more useful to me to know that there are no matching hits that to make me click several links before I realize none will have what I want (in this case Google doesn't even do me the courtesy of telling me that it is dropping "schematic" from the search, or at least changing it into a word that doesn't return schematics.)
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