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Actually, AltaVista was a good search engine, if you knew how to use it. What Google did was deskill search, so that you got good (or sometimes better) results
by scholia 11y ago
Actually, AltaVista was a good search engine, if you knew how to use it. What Google did was deskill search, so that you got good (or sometimes better) results from very simple queries, rather than complex search strings.
- nl 11y agoBy the time Google was available Altavista wasn't a good search engine. I was intimately familiar with using it - indeed, I started using it when it was good, as http://www.altavista.digital.com http://www.altavista.digital.com (in those days we had to type both the http:// http:// and the www). The search itself was ok in the sense that it indexed things correctly. However, the ranking was very naively implemented and used basic TF-IDF style ranking of pages that matched the query, with strong bias towards the META tags (remember them?). That meant that meta-tag stuffing was a thing, and very simple keyword stuffed pages ranked very highly.
- scholia 11y agoI was one of the earliest users, and if you could construct good Boolean searches, you could get good results. The thing about Google was that dumb searches worked very well.