Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

digital.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 323 posts

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

#81

Post by sitkack »

CharlesColeman wrote: post #65
itp wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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…

All I can think of is the courtesy of a 404. No can be a powerful, yet welcome signal. The reticence to say No causes more harm that good.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P2vkiLHiTcY

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

#82

Post by Isamu »

The main reason I started using Altavista was because it was faster. I don't know why this wasn't mentioned in the article, it was one of main points of the Altavista architecture.

We probably can't appreciate it because Google is truly FAST and we are spoiled by it. But the alternative search engines were slow, slow, slow.

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

#83

Post by dvtrn »

pureliquidhw wrote: post #50
d35007 wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah but is it pronounced like "wares" or like "Juarez"?

I know it's wares with a z, but I've always pronounced it "Juarez" in my head. Never gave it a thought until now!

Never gave it a thought until now!

Neither did I! And I'm a bit humored to see other people pronounced it like that too :) I wonder what causes it, regional dialect or something? I'm part-Mexican, grew up bilingual and it just sort of happened without thinking about it, I discovered 'warez', immediately pronounced it "Juarez" (without the Spanish jota inflection) and it took 30 years (today) to learn it's 'wares'.

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

#84

Post by macintux »

bwb wrote: post #30
ocdtrekkie wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I do not understand how you guys can call Google the new AOL, Google search works like a charm at a huge scale. What is the problem?

Google’s algorithms have the ability to make companies essentially undiscoverable, deliberately or not, so there’s at least some comparison to be made with AOL’s keyword registry.

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

#86

Post by simonsaidit »

strictnein wrote: post #72
adsadadsad wrote: post #4

Altavisa 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.

I think its partly the reason Im a software engineer today.

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

#87

Post by lallysingh »

elfakyn wrote: post #73
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"

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.

Probably not. There's some enterprise gapps customer out there still using it.

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

#88

Post by rusk »

Altavista were also the first ones doing online translation.

babelfish.altavista.com, anyone remember that?

The Babelfish being Douglas Adams' fictional fish that you stuck in your ear to use as a universal translator.

there was also a fake domain called alta-vista.com that was very much of the goatse variety.

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

#89

Post by jackfraser »

wil421 wrote: post #7
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…

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…

I used to work for a company making a SaaS tool for SEO teams to use to see how their site was ranking for their desired keywords on Google. This meant searching Google six million times a day from a motley crew of grey-market proxies and IPv6 providers.

We're definitely in a Google bubble. It becomes very clear that they have intense control over what shows up on the first page of searches, especially in their Featured Snippets and Carousels at the top, and their native-looking ad results.

Control over search results is incredibly powerful in terms of anything from influencing the zeitgeist, to controlling marketing efforts at a grand scale, through to straight propaganda.

We really run an incredible risk as a society by putting too many eggs into the Google basket. Using their browser to use their service to consume their results means a complete monoculture; and while they're not really visibly abusing it now, it's clear that they can subtly manipulate things for a long time before they get caught, and they have the platform to be able to do far more should they (or any government actor forcing their hand) decide they want to.

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

#90

Post by bonyt »

afandian wrote: post #27
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"

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…

There are products that do a precise search on large datasets, like Westlaw and LexisNexis searches for legal research. Of course, services like these can charge around $100 per query or more, though I’m not sure of their specific rates.
Post reply on HN