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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

#91

Post by ocdtrekkie »

macintux wrote: post #75
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…

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.

What would you be trying to "fix" here? More often than not, the first result for a given query on most common search engines is the correct, authoritative source for something. If I search for a company, the company's official website is nearly always the first real result.

The only thing I think is really wrong with search (and all major search engines right now are guilty of this) is making paid ads look very similar to real results, which makes it possible to pay to hijack a result.

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

#92

Post by not2b »

The approach that Altavista took didn't scale with web growth. It was based on the idea of database searching, where the engine was supposed to return all pages that matched a query. This meant that you couldn't expect to type a generic term and get a useful result; you'd be overwhelmed with random pages. You could find pages that contained an exact phrase, and this could be useful for finding out what some error message means. But as the web exploded in size, the results you could easily get from Altavista got worse and worse; you could fight by adding more and more qualifiers to filter out what you didn't want, but junk results were mixed in with good results.

That's why Yahoo had a business: search engines were of limited use pre-Google, so you needed a hand-curated list to find the good stuff on the web.

Google was first to figure out an effective algorithm to rank results by quality. People immediately stepped in to try to game the system with link farms, junk tags and the like, but even so, it was a revolution.

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

#93

Post by Finnucane »

rusk wrote: post #88

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.

O yeah, the early days of online translation were . . . interesting. Especially fun was bidirectional translation (i.e., english -> german -> english, etc.).

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

#94

Post by evrydayhustling »

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"

My first job in high school was adapting altavista into an interface for an internal government parts procurement tool (thrilling, right?). The Boolean operators let us use altavista kind of like a database layer: we offered a cartoony interface that build queries behind the scenes that hit existing parts specification documents - eliminating a giant data structuring and reentry problem.

It was my first exposure to how much work could be saved by working efficiently with unstructured data! Of course, Google took this to a whole other level, realizing that for common users queries themselves should be treated as unstructured data! Learning as much as you can from how people already express themselves is one way to write the future, it turns out...

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

#95

Post by wolco »

afandian wrote: post #47
luckylion wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting idea. I figured it was due to the user base of 2019 being very different than that of 2010, and Google adapting to the fact that most of their users aren't technology literate and cannot formulate clear search queries, so they just try to guess what might be of interest to them.

Absolutely. Scale and diversity applies not only to ingested documents but users. I'm under no illusions that Google has said "here are a chunk of users who may want precise search, at a cost of X, but this other demographic can bring us revenue Y". That's fine, it's their business, but it makes the virtual monopoly even more painful.

It provides an opening for dgg users or a smaller search engine. Google has to cover all users which means not everyone will be happy.

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

#97

Post by wtetzner »

diegocg wrote: post #54
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.

How do you get to verbatim mode?

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

#98

Post by timcederman »

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.

It still doesn't always respect the quotes.

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

#99

Post by BryantD »

This article misses one of the primary reasons for AV's demise -- we didn't update our primary index for several months just as Google was gaining mindshare. A ridiculously high percentage of our front page links were 404s, while Google was always fresh.

This was particularly bad because one of our earlier strong points was fresh indexes. Our ability to refresh the supplementary index on the fly was awesome. When you lose one of your primary strengths, it's noticeable.

I don't mean to minimize the downside of losing focus. That's one of the biggest lessons I learned while working there. I'd say that our failure to maintain a high quality index was directly caused by our loss of focus, in fact. But it's important to remember that both UI and the underlying index quality matter.

"What about PageRank?"

Eh, not actually unique to Google. Remember that Jon Kleinberg was developing HITS in parallel -- AV was well aware of the concept of measuring page importance using incoming links, and we had our own implementation. It may not have been as good. It's hard to tell when your underlying data source is stale.

Also, any AV article which doesn't note that we bought Elon Musk's first company is inherently flawed. ;)

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