61–70 of 323 posts
I remember having to use all those meta search engines that combined the results of several engines together to average out all the trash of each result set, and then Google appeared and was better than that.
Makes you wonder about stuff like Kayak today in the travel space. Is there some better way out there waiting to be found?
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…
does it work well if you put the individual words in quotes? It seems to rank popularity above exact match, and a word in quotes forces it to be present.
https://ipfs.io/ipfs/QmQXeXmMMVfPL9Syqgkoo8zLf6noGrSnGFbnetL...
If other IPFS users wants to pin that to distribute the load, that'd be great.
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…
Google really needs to develop a "pro mode" search engine that works for this use case. I get the need for an "answers engine" for less savvy users and more casual use cases, but it's a massive company. It can afford to execute two products in its core competency (rather than umpteen messaging apps that it will kill, along with a lot of other useless and/or doomed stuff).
"...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
So I searched for ‘Amiga games’. It came back with a screen full of junk.
I looked at my friend and said ‘none of this has anything to do with Amiga games’.
He said no you need to ‘+computer’ ‘-Spanish’.
I said to him, ‘who’s crappy idea was this?’
Needless to say we all got better at booolean searches and Altavista was light years ahead of yahoo.
Google was a welcome change, made the internet a cool place for about 10 years.
> (hardware) up to: 12 64bit 350MHz processor, 14GB RAM, 39TB storage
220 hits/s dynamic content on that is _very_ impressive.
I still use 'ping av.com' as a quick test for internet connectivity. Still works even though it's seemingly owned by a Chinese company now.
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…
Back in those days, I was a fan on the Yahoo! directory approach. The web was still small and explore-able, so a directory actually was useful if you didn't actually know what you were specifically looking for.
Meanwhile, if I did know what I was looking for, AltaVista gave me endless pages of random links that were only vaguely related to my search query. I don't think I ever found myself liking it much.