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Altavista: The rise and fall of the biggest pre-Google search engine
- jcims 8y agoI 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.
- freediver 8y agoI am in the 'ping ibm.com' camp
- webwanderings 8y agoping yahoo.com Old habits die hard.
- quickthrower2 8y agoIm a ping 1.1.1.1 guy. Fast to type.
- macintux 8y agoI 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 was rarely useful at all.) I’m not a fan of Google today, but for years I would tell everyone I knew about it. (Edit: fixed the year.)
- wil421 8y agoDo 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 topics. Are we all in a Google search bubble?
- ocdtrekkie 8y agoOne 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 literally often advertised on TV or radio as how to get to a given site or web feature.
- bwb 8y agoI 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?
- DylanBohlender 8y agoI think the crux of the others’ point is that Google’s increasingly complex secret sauce for returning search results, combined with its general ubiquity, has perhaps created a monoculture whereby we view the Web almost entirely through Google’s lens. AOL’s “curation” of the web via its portal was a bit more direct for sure, but I can see how the effect could be similar.
- mda 8y agoOh believe me you can find all sorts of non curated filth as well using Google as well. I think it is still a pretty good engine for "if you insist, here is the path to rabbit hole". If you let google know about you, it will tune the results for you. I keep my history for this reason.
- wil421 8y agoIt’s not comparing technical merit or business decisions. AOL for a long time was the window into the web for lots of American users. Google is now a window into the web for users around the world.
- 8y ago
- agumonkey 8y agoGoogle is interesting because it was so obviously useful that it was a barely conscious decision. Just like following a river. Gradually they became invasive and overwhelming.. to the point that I have a slight anxiety regarding anything Google in the news.
- cm2187 8y agoFor a long time I used yahoo. The nice thing with a directory is that if you found an interesting website you could look up similar websites in the same yahoo category. I think this functionality is just gone.
- brobdingnagians 8y agoAre there any sites with a "crowdsourced" directory? Might be interesting to have something like wiki-pedia that is a curated source, but curated by a larger group of volunteers. Although, I could see it getting corrupted by marketing purposes, but at the same time it might be able to be maintained cheaply by a foundation. Human intelligence providing grouped sites might be a useful asset, and there could be statistics/requirements for getting listed.
- classichasclass 8y agoThere used to be dmoz.org, r.i.p. It doesn't seem to be working anymore, but it used to at least have an archive.
- kirion25 8y agoA mirror of the archive still exists: https://dmoztools.net/ https://dmoztools.net/
- vladd 8y agoYou can check-out http://www.curlie.org/ http://www.curlie.org/ , which is the successor of DMoz, the volunteer-powered now-defunct Directory of Mozilla project.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- wslh 8y agoI had a good experience with Altavista via the "NEAR" operator which was never fully implemented by Google (there is a wildcard "*" in Google added much later). With the NEAR operator you can find pages where terms are closer and narrow the results. Without NEAR terms can appear in discrete places of the page.
- sevensor 8y agoI think I switched from Hotbot to Google around 2000, maybe 2001. I told everybody I knew about the fantastic new search engine. Their plucky upstart vibe made them seem like they were carrying forward the spirit of the internet back then, before they ate the internet.
- astazangasta 8y agoYeah, I had the same history. Google worked better than keyword search because the web was young and naive and not built by evil spammers yet, and people had not figured out how to game PageRank. That lasted a few years. Now it is mush again.
- octorian 8y ago> Essentially we all agreed the web was unusable because it was too hard to find what you were looking for 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.
- dontbenebby 8y agoYahoo was good for discovery IMHO. Yahoo + webrings + Geocities neighborhoods lead to a fun feeling of exploration I rarely feel nowadays.
- kinkrtyavimoodh 8y agoI know it's a bit of a fashion here to bash Google but so many Google products still 'spark joy' in my life. Maps, GMail Search, Photos, Translate, Speech Recognition etc.
- glenrivard 8y agoWould put YouTube TV also on that list. Just a much better UX and cheaper t boot.
- athenot 8y agoAltavista was my favorite search engine before Google. Being able to put in a query (which could have logical expressions) instead of a directory of links was awesome!
- adsadadsad 8y agoAltavisa 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
- agumonkey 8y agoit's spelled cerealz
- welly 8y agoSerialbox?
- SmellyGeekBoy 8y agowarez
- d35007 8y agoYeah but is it pronounced like "wares" or like "Juarez"?
- folkrav 8y ago"Warez" is from "software", so it's meant to be pronounced "wares" https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/us/warez https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/us/warez
- pureliquidhw 8y agoI know it's wares with a z, but I've always pronounced it "Juarez" in my head. Never gave it a thought until now!
- dvtrn 8y agoNever 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'.
- mtmail 8y agoStarting 2005 both altavista and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AlltheWeb https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AlltheWeb were just frontend templates and CSS stylesheets around the Yahoo search, even ran on the same servers. I'm surprised Yahoo kept the separate brands live until 2011.
- woliveirajr 8y agoAltavista was a great showcase on how powerfull servers and internet were at that era: before it, internet was considered something that needed Yellow Pages to be viable. With altavista the content gained relevance over the location, suddenly you didn't need to know where to find it, knowing what you wanted was enought. Google was a big step afterwards, showing that even when you know what you want, you might not express it correctly, so having some ranking on results was helpful.
- siggen 8y agoIf 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.
- baldfat 8y agoGoogle 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.
- siggen 8y agoI fear all we have now is anecdotal evidence. :-) In my case, it was a gradual conversion to Google from Altavista than something immediate. So, funny thing: Back then, if one search engine didn't have what you were looking for, you would try another. Now, if Google doesn't have what you are looking for, where do you go? Does it mean the answer does not exist on the Internet? Do you try Bing or Duck?
- steelframe 8y agoDuck is Bing. https://www.quora.com/How-is-the-Bing-API-used-by-DuckDuckGo https://www.quora.com/How-is-the-Bing-API-used-by-DuckDuckGo There are effectively only two competitive search engines in the U.S. and European markets today. In those markets, Bing is the only market pressure keeping Google honest.
- irrational 8y agoDid Duck Duck Go use Google previously? I thought when I first started using it years ago it was using google on the back end.
- scarmig 8y ago
- Thoreandan 8y ago... and in 2019 the "digital.com" domain is apparently hosted by a site that can't handle the traffic of this article. SPECIAL BONUS: Their current robots.txt appears to be blocking the old Digital.com pages from the WayBack machine. Argh.
- Thoreandan 8y agoIt's apparently owned by a UK company called Quality Nonsense - https://qualitynonsense.com/portfolio/digital-com/ https://qualitynonsense.com/portfolio/digital-com/ - currently featuring such insightful content as "Error establishing a database connection".
- classichasclass 8y agoThey do at least acknowledge the history of the name, though you'll do some scrolling to see it: https://digital.com/about/ https://digital.com/about/ That said, being a nerd of a certain age range, I saw "digital.com" and I got very excited about something I didn't get when I actually clicked on the link ...
- icedchai 8y agoI still can't believe HP actually sold digital.com DEC / Digital is a huge part of computing history: PDP, VAX, Alpha.
- fencepost 8y agoThe Internet Archive stopped honoring robots.txt back in 2017 because "Robots.txt meant for search engines don’t work well for web archives" Not sure without a bit more digging whether they honor explicit rules for their crawler. Edit: (but a little looking at comments indicates that they don't, and notes that ia_archiver is Alexa, not the Internet Archive)
- Thoreandan 8y agoHmmm, and their robots.txt seems to not be at fault. I wonder if they excluded it to not overlap with Alta Vista, still it's tragic that digital.com isn't browsable in the wayback machine.
- drxzcl 8y agopizza "deep dish" +Chicago
- spudlyo 8y agoWhat 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"
- myself248 8y agoAnd the ability to do case-sensitive search. "DoS" != "DOS"
- ben_w 8y agoI’ve seen academics upset that Google insisted on changing their search term from “adsorb” to “absorb”. Apparently Google Scholar (?) couldn’t be forced the way Google.com could be.
- pedrocx486 8y agoI don't get the "(?)" you made, but yes, it's a thing: https://scholar.google.com/ https://scholar.google.com/
- ben_w 8y agoThe “(?)” is because I’m only 85% sure that was the Google product they were unhappy about.
- leeoniya 8y agoi miss NEAR
- ramraj07 8y agoAsterick with quoted words works
- afandian 8y agoI'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 the data they have to ingest to an adequate user experience.
- ofrzeta 8y agoCa. 1996 we implemented ad blocking Altavista in our corporate net through DNS rewrites because the ads were already annoying back then. Comparatively small but also with comparatively low bandwidth.
- sct202 8y agoI 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.
- rco8786 8y agoDogpile! Makes you wonder about stuff like Kayak today in the travel space. Is there some better way out there waiting to be found?
- npmaile 8y agosadly enough the answer here is also google. flights.google.com hotels.google.com
- sah2ed 8y agoWrt meta search engines, I can only recollect Vivisimo, though there were quite a number of them at that time. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vivisimo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vivisimo
- jgalt212 8y agoand yet ensemble methods seem to win an overwhelming proportion of the kaggle competitions and the netflix prize.
- RoutinePlayer 8y agoVividly remember why AltaVista failed -- they monetized way TOO QUICKLY. Everyone was griping about its sluggishness. Then a few months later a friend pointed me to this new google.com thingy, with its minimalist page, and no ads!
- erikig 8y ago"...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
- 52-6F-62 8y agoThat is just fantastic.
- pavlov 8y agoThat could be Apple’s next naming scheme: iPhone XR Max Turbo Laser
- Nelson69 8y agoThe "8400" part almost seems arbitrary to the rest of the name
- asdff 8y agoEveryone still names their crap like this. "Dell Optiplex 7010" or "Nvidia GeForce GTX 1060 GTI RTX ETC ETC" gives me absolutely zero information about the product other than what to google.
- Gitnumb 8y agoDomain related. Digital.com later sold, AV.com sold. Premium domains everywhere.
- cromulent 8y agoLycos is still running. https://www.lycos.com https://www.lycos.com
- m-p-3 8y agoThe website seems to be struggling, I pinned it on my IPFS node using 2read.net https://ipfs.io/ipfs/QmQXeXmMMVfPL9Syqgkoo8zLf6noGrSnGFbnetLHT2o79H https://ipfs.io/ipfs/QmQXeXmMMVfPL9Syqgkoo8zLf6noGrSnGFbnetL... If other IPFS users wants to pin that to distribute the load, that'd be great.
- jgalt212 8y agothanks, worked for me.
- xedarius 8y agoI remember having ‘a go on the Internet’ round my friends house in the early nineties. He said go on type anything you want to know about. 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.
- pmlnr 8y ago> On its launch day in 1995, the new search engine saw around 300,000 visitors. One year later in 1996, it was serving 19 million visitors each day. > (hardware) up to: 12 64bit 350MHz processor, 14GB RAM, 39TB storage 220 hits/s dynamic content on that is _very_ impressive.
- dougb 8y agoI'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 8y ago[deleted]
- dictum 8y agoA 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)
- Isamu 8y agoThe 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.
- baxtr 8y agoI still remember exactly the day a friend of mine called me, saying: “There is this new search engine, it’s so much cleaner than Altavista, and better, it jus has a strange name: google”
- rusk 8y agoAltavista 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.
- Finnucane 8y agoO yeah, the early days of online translation were . . . interesting. Especially fun was bidirectional translation (i.e., english -> german -> english, etc.).
- rusk 8y agoIt was “good enough” to get a sense of what was in the document. Whats particularly interesting is how little things have come along since then!
- giarc 8y agoI can't comment on how accurate translation is, but I'd say the field has come far as you can now hold up your phone to a bunch of text and get real time translation. You can also use an app to get real time speech recognition plus translation.
- heed 8y agoI remember using babelfish as a way of sometimes getting around my high school's internet filter. I don't remember exactly why/how it worked, and it didn't always work, but it was fun when it did.
- rkuykendall-com 8y agoSame! It worked because BabelFish would 'translate' an entire website for you. So if you set it to `Spanish=>English` and then entered an english language URL, it would proxy all the content 'converted' with no real changes.
- not2b 8y agoThe 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.
- mycall 8y agoI preferred allinone.com instead. Comedy to see different iframes of search knowledge.
- BryantD 8y agoThis 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. ;)
- Infernal 8y agoWhy was that primary index not updated for those several months? What happened that led to that?
- Zenst 8y agoI suspect it was management, after all search engines was unprofitable and borderline charity work. It was not until the vision of capitalising thru advertising that the whole market changed and by then, Google had outlasted and innovated the other `charity` offerings of the time.
- JadeNB 8y agoBryantD responded to a similar question in another thread (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19172762 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19172762).
- CydeWeys 8y agoWhy didn't you update your primary index for several months? Were there serious technical breakages?
- intsunny 8y agoNot mentioned in this article, there was an attempt to reboot Altavista into a Google competitor: raging.com https://www.geek.com/news/altavista-is-raging-565120/ https://www.geek.com/news/altavista-is-raging-565120/
- CapitalistCartr 8y agoAlta Vista was great. The skill was in the user, yhough, not the algorithm. Construct searches like: (word AND word) NEAR (word OR word) and it worked great.
- glaberficken 8y agoAs a European early adopter I still remember the day i switched from recommending Altavista to all my friends and family to Google. Speed was definitely not the reason. It was purely about the usefulness of the results. There was just a point in time where Google surpassed everyone else in relevance of the 1st page of results, and there was no going back.
- sytelus 8y agoDo you remember the year this happened for you?
- jcmoscon 8y agoI remember that they payed $3 million dollars for the altavista.com domain.
- bad_user 8y agoI remember being in an Internet Cafe, being as always frustrated by not being able to find anything for my search on both Altavista and Yahoo. Back then Altavista was my primary search engine, but I hated it. The I saw “Google” loaded on another computer and decided to try it out. The difference in quality was overwhelming, in that first session it made me smile and made an instant convert out of me. Another difference is that Google did not have any ads initially, and when they finally added ads, they were clearly highlighting them as ads, instead of masking them as regular search results. And overall their interface was really clean compared with their competition. I don’t know if it was my search patterns, maybe other people had a different experience, but the difference was night and day. Even today, I may whine and moan about Google, but their Search is still the best and I’m saying this as a DuckDuckGo user.
- JohnFen 8y agoI have to admit there are times when I miss Altvista, particularly since the quality of Google's search results has plummeted for me to the point where DDG is at least equally good. I really, really miss those boolean operators.
- drallison 8y agoA few historical notes: Paul Flaherty (1964-2006) was a principal engineer at the the Digital Equipment Network Research Laboratory. Paul is credited with having the idea for Alta Vista, but I think that it was Andy Freeman's sudden flash of insight that led to Paul's development. Paul had been in Italy at a trade show; when he returned he talked with Brian Reid, who headed the Lab, about the need to find a demonstration project that showed off the top-of-the-line Alpha computers. Paul and Andy and I used to have lunch together frequently. At one point, just after Paul returned from Italy, we were talking about Internet search at lunch. I'd been using the Magellan search engine and had some comments about how useful a better search engine would be. Andy began talk about the problem and sketched out how a better search engine might work and how a web crawler could gather the information needed to do an index. Paul listened and then went back to his office and enlisted Brian Reid's help in resourcing a search engine project. Brian got Louis Monier and Mike Burrows involved. The three of them did the hard work of reducing the concept to a real program running on an Alpha computer. Alta Vista was an instant success with Alta Vista computers overflowing Paul's office and cluttering the hall nearby as the team worked to satisfy market demands for search.
- DonHopkins 8y agoThey sure used a lot of electricity at DECWRL! https://milk.com/wall-o-shame/bucket.html https://milk.com/wall-o-shame/bucket.html
- irrational 8y agoWow! But talk about a story that ended too soon. I want to hear about repercussions for the restaurant!
- ArrayList 8y agoI miss HotBot. Anyone remember that?
- UncleSlacky 8y agoThat was probably the best single engine before Google. Around the same time, I also used the meta-search site dogpile.com - which still exists.
- smileypete 8y agoSurprised no-one has mentioned metacrawler so far: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MetaCrawler https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MetaCrawler
- srhngpr 8y agoI even used the free dial-up (ad-supported) internet that Altavista provided back in the day!
- raiyu 8y agoI think the main takeaway from this is really conception. There was a problem that a team set about to solve. They were left on their own to operate because solving search wasn't really what the company was interested in, as much as showing how powerful their computers were. Left to their own devices Altavista became a successful search engine because it was able to focus on what users really wanted from search and do tremendous pioneering in that area. It was my default search engine of choice before google gained steam. However, from there, once value was created corporate entities began to try and extract more value. Now the user was no longer front and center, and unless the business decisions coincided with what the user wanted you would obviously begin to move the product further and further away from it's core user benefits. This is a very typical processes in most businesses. Businesses till think that their needs come first, rather than their customers/users. This happens so frequently that it really is a just insane that no one addresses it. Eventually those business people get enough things wrong that they are left no choice but to return to the core of what made them successful and just hope that the market hasn't moved away to a competitor. In Altavista's case the market had already shifted. Doesn't matter how many books you write on this subject this continues to occur and really highlights the need for a strong product focused CEO so that they can ensure that the customer comes first and the business second.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- akirby 8y agoDEC was based in Maynard, MA not CA. We had a couple excellent teams in the Bay area that were acquired from Xerox as I recall. The Systems Research Center in Palo Alto and WRL. AltaVista was not the only business that DEC failed to capitalize on. We had an $800M networking business when Cisco was just starting. DEC defunded that business to invest more in other projects. We had a storage server business that we sold to a little company call EMC too. It's quite sad...
- syn0byte 8y ago20 years later, SSD drives are eating "enterprise storage" companies alive. Time marches on...
- sytelus 8y agoNumber of things DEC missed out on: personal computer, DOS, search engine, networking, storage. How can something having so much lead keep missing out on so big? What they could have done differently?
- pointillistic 8y agoWhen David Wetherell, of CMGI fame, bought Alta Vista and was driving it to the IPO, I remember telling him urgently that Google was eating AV lunch. He just brushed me off, as if I was telling him nonsense. Same fate with Lycos and if you will Yahoo.
- fareesh 8y agoI used to use something called webcrawler as a kid. Was it a search engine or just a meta-search engine?
- b0bby_tabl3s 8y agoI was just telling someone about this search engine and how I was sad to see it go. You could do a case sensitive search with Altavista. Good stuff.
- gojomo 8y agoAs I vaguely recall, from my own perceptions as web search was arriving: * There were a bunch of early "full-text"-ish search experiments, but Lycos best proved its immense value and potential first. * Then, AltaVista arrived with breadth & speed beyond what had previously been possible. Still, it required a bit of expertise to craft your queries. * Then, Excite burst ahead with a quality breakthrough. Something about their use of HTML-styling & in-link text meant that even with fewer sites, the results were much better. * Then, Hotbot (powered by Inktomi) had an era of best mix of fresh-content, deep-content, and quality ranking. * Then, all those pioneers dropped the ball, in one way or another, letting Google out-rank, out-crawl, and out-business-model them. (And much of Google's business-model was pioneered by "Goto", later "Overture".) Sad, really, especially how many coulda-shoulda competitors eventually died inside Yahoo. (Including Overture.)
- dougb5 8y agoThis is right on. To add some color from my memory as a Lycos employee, it felt that many of the early search engines dropped by the ball in their rush become "portals". There was this mass delusion that it was important to hold the user's attention as long as possible in order to serve more ads--to own or otherwise control the content that users ultimately ended up at. Web search itself was seen as a commodity. This didn't seem so obviously wrong at the time. The Web was so much smaller.
- sytelus 8y agoI had say 2000 buble bursting also played part. It was easier to survive for a nimble startup and hard for behemoth with huge employee count and little revenues. I wonder if that didn’t happened then if we would have more competition in this space.
- crypto_guide 8y agoBefore Google, companies operated like a government office. I suppose, Google brought in a shift in thinking of internet companies.
- crypto_guide 8y agoAnyone remember hotbot?
- gp2000 8y agoAlthough it is a historical (and disavowed) footnote, the Open Text Index launched in April 1995 and sported full text indexing of web pages -- more than 6 months before Alta Vista's launch in December that year. It did serve as a back-end search for Yahoo! though it never could keep up with the full query volume. It was lambasted by the creators of Google for experimenting with putting clearly-marked ads in search results. That transgression looks hilariously quaint to modern eyes. https://www.referenceforbusiness.com/history2/72/Open-Text-Corporation.html https://www.referenceforbusiness.com/history2/72/Open-Text-C...
- crispytx 8y agoI use to be an Altavista user. In Middle School one of my teachers showed us Google in the computer lab and I've been using it ever since. What I remember standing out at the time was Google's UI; it was just a logo, a text input, and two buttons. I thought that was neat and just kept using it after that. The search results may have been better, but that wasn't why I made the switch.
- irrational 8y agoFor some reason I don't recall using Altavista very much. I was aware of it, but I remember using AskJeeves and Yahoo search much more.
- showdead 8y agoI remember getting a free polo shirt with the AltaVista logo embroidered on it. I don't recall the specific circumstances that led to being sent a shirt, and I wore holes in it so I no longer have it, but it really was superior to the alternatives before Google came along.
- i_am_nomad 8y ago"Yahoo closed AltaVista quietly in 2013." Wow - what must have it been like to work on/for AltaVista in late 2012? Seems like a kind of extreme professional exile at that point.
- ngcc_hk 8y agoNo permission to access ...
- saltyshake 8y agosame thing
- fbnbr 8y agoAnyone else getting “You don't have permission to access /about/altavista/ on this server.” ?
- auslander 8y agoForbidden You don't have permission to access /about/altavista/ on this server. Apache/2.4.10 (Debian) Server at digital.com Port 443
- known 8y agoPrior to Google I liked infind.com meta-search
- 6c696e7578 8y agoWhat I miss is how well it rendered on mobile phones. My handset is pretty old, the relatively lightweight page was a pleasure to use.
- cromat3 8y agoGoogle cached version of site: https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:i-IE6lZl8LIJ:https://digital.com/about/altavista/+&cd=1&hl=hr&ct=clnk&gl=hr&client=opera https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:i-IE6l...
- joelberman 8y agoDEC wanted to sell Alphaservers (and VMS). Altavista was a great demonstration of scale and speed and distributed computing (versus a giant mainframe). Crawling and indexing speed. Tons of open ip connections, security,etc were all selling points. Bring large customers to see the physical Altavista and also the ip exchange helped sell lots of systems. DEC was a hardware company. Google wasn’t. Made a lot of difference in priorities.
- sytelus 8y agoSo DEC missed out on IBM PC revolution, Microsoft DOS and now search engines!
- xivzgrev 8y agoI like reading this comment thread on why google may have been superior to altavista. It gives a more “adult” perspective on something I remember as a kid. I was in middle or high school, and remember using several different search engines: altavista, lycos, yahoo, dogpile, etc. they all were bulky portals and search results probably weren’t great (that’s why I used so many). Then one day a friend said “hey have you used google?” I said no, and he showed me. -it was clean/simple -the search page (and results) loaded really fast -the search results must’ve been better as well -I remember I liked the quirkiness of it too. It felt fun to use Google From that day on I only remember using Google, until recently given their size, been using Duck Duck Go more often. It’s pretty good for regular search (though maybe 10% queries return some less relevant results than Google) but product search still has a long way to go.
- usr1106 8y agoThe link repeatedly gives me nothing but 403 Forbidden You don't have permission to access /about/altavista/ on this server.