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If 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 56
by siggen 8y ago
If 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 agoDDG is just a whitelabeled Bing? That's interesting.
- kinkrtyavimoodh 8y agoThere are only three major worldwide English language indexes—Google, Bing and Yandex. For all the praise DDG gets here, it couldn't exist without Bing.
- mzs 8y agoyandex is what I try second
- philliphaydon 8y agoI think I started using the internet in 1997, and used Altavista because the results were better than Google. Wasn't until ~2000 that I began to find results on Google faster than Altavista. It was probably subjective but IMO google wasn't better initially, but it did end up being the best. Even tho I use bing or ddg, Google still has the best search engine.
- InclinedPlane 8y agoIt was also an order of magnitude faster (a fraction of a second for results vs. several seconds).
- entity345 8y ago> However, Altavista took seconds to load the first page (on 56k) whereas Google's first page loaded almost immediately. That's why I moved from Altavista to Google. Google had a minimalist homepage and results page which were focussed and loaded very quickly compared to the bloated pages (for the time) of Altavista and Yahoo.
- UncleSlacky 8y agoAV did also offer a minimalist site, raging.com, after Google appeared. Going to the site today, it still tries to redirect to https://www.altavista.com/web/text?raging=1/ https://www.altavista.com/web/text?raging=1/
- Isamu 8y agoHuh, 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.
- pinebox 8y agoThis was my experience as well. I had a deep link to AltaVista's "advanced" search page which loaded plenty fast. Between AV and InfoSeek (which I used the Netscape plugin to get a browser search bar for) I was seeing better results than Google until sometime in the mid-00's. Sure if you wanted to skim the surface of what was available on a given topic or just wanted the most popular links, Google was fine in the 90's and early 00's; But if you were deep diving or wanted something more obscure you needed other search engines.