I'd like to see the source code for Altavista released to the Computer History Museum. I think it is of historical significance. If anyone knows who currently has that code, please post a comment. I think there is a lot to learn from examining old computer code.
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
#72Altavisa 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
Holy hell I hard forgotten about astalavista. What a great site.
Re: Altavista: The rise and fall of the biggest pre-Google search engine
#73What 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"
Google changed the operators; now it's double quotes instead of plus (it was changed for google+ so that the plus searches g+ profiles and pages). You now have to search:
"noir" "film" -"pinot noir"
I wonder whether they'll revert back now that google+ is dead.
Re: Altavista: The rise and fall of the biggest pre-Google search engine
#74I'd like to see the source code for Altavista released to the Computer History Museum. I think it is of historical significance. If anyone knows who currently has that code, please post a comment. I think there is a lot to learn from examining old computer code.
[deleted]
Re: Altavista: The rise and fall of the biggest pre-Google search engine
#75Earlier quoted context omitted.
Do you think Google is the new AOL? Way back AOL had their homepage where you saw an AOL recommended part of the web. You still had access to the web but for most first time users it was easier to use than a web browser alone. I say this because I’ve been wondering if we now have a Google snapshot of the web instead of AOLs homepage. Don’t get me wrong search is much better than a more or less static homepage of topi…
One of those "Google is the new AOL" moments hit me when I heard a commercial for Google on the radio recently. Specifically, it was someone explaining that they had a feature built especially for veterans to find jobs relevant to them, and that you could get to it by typing "jobs for veterans" into Google search. It just sounded so much like the old AOL Keyword feature, which a lot of people forgot about, but was li…
Interestingly, that was the idea I distinctly remember from the dinner party: someone suggested the only fix for Internet searches was to implement something like AOL Keywords globally. A central registry of keywords.
Re: Altavista: The rise and fall of the biggest pre-Google search engine
#76If 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.
It was also an order of magnitude faster (a fraction of a second for results vs. several seconds).
Re: Altavista: The rise and fall of the biggest pre-Google search engine
#77What 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"
They used to behave in Google as you describe and it was quite reliable. But somewhere along the line, Google changed how it handles search expressions (for the worse, in my opinion).
A comment below you mentions Verbatim Mode [0]. I haven't tried it yet, but it looks promising.
[0] https://searchenginewatch.com/sew/news/2126346/google-introd...
Re: Altavista: The rise and fall of the biggest pre-Google search engine
#78A case of Baader-Meinhof today: I was reading about AltaVista an hour or so before this was posted. (Hyperlink trail: DARPA's Memex -> Memex -> Paul Flaherty)
Re: Altavista: The rise and fall of the biggest pre-Google search engine
#79I 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.
Dogpile! Makes you wonder about stuff like Kayak today in the travel space. Is there some better way out there waiting to be found?
sadly enough the answer here is also google.
flights.google.com
hotels.google.com
Re: Altavista: The rise and fall of the biggest pre-Google search engine
#80If 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.
Huh, it took me a while to switch to Google because every time I tried it it took longer. I only switched when it became reliably faster.