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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

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. ;)

Infernal 8y ago
Why was that primary index not updated for those several months? What happened that led to that?
- Zenst 8y ago
  I 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 ago
  BryantD responded to a similar question in another thread (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19172762 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19172762).
CydeWeys 8y ago
Why didn't you update your primary index for several months? Were there serious technical breakages?
- BryantD 8y ago
  Internal issues I'm not comfortable talking about in depth. It was a combination of technical problems and political problems; I expect any specific person's opinion of the percentage breakdown of those factors depends a lot on which group they were in at the time.
  - reificator 8y ago
    > I expect any specific person's opinion of the percentage breakdown of those factors depends a lot on which group they were in at the time. I feel like that tells me where your percentage would lie... EDIT: I apologize, it was intended as a joke to lighten the mood. It's never a good thing to lose one's job or have a company fail, even that long ago, so my response is to attempt humor.
    - JadeNB 8y ago
      > > I expect any specific person's opinion of the percentage breakdown of those factors depends a lot on which group they were in at the time. > I feel like that tells me where your percentage would lie... Are you responding to BryantD's admission of (widespread) bias by accusing BryantD of bias? This seems to add nothing to the conversation.
      - reificator 8y ago
        I apologize, it was intended as a joke to lighten the mood. It's never a good thing to lose one's job or have a company fail, even that long ago, so my response is to attempt humor.
        JadeNB 8y ago
        > I apologize, it was intended as a joke to lighten the mood. It's never a good thing to lose one's job or have a company fail, even that long ago, so my response is to attempt humor. I see; I incorrectly read it as accusatory. Thanks for the very civil reply!
new12345 8y ago
I feel that Google brought in a shift in thinking of internet companies. In pre-google era, companies operated like an government office, once they gain marked foot hold they virtually stop enhancing their products. Google and other successful startups have taught us that a tech company is prone to fall if it doesn't innovate.
- Zenst 8y ago
  Which is kinda ironic given Google was born on the back of a DARPA contract :- https://qz.com/1145669/googles-true-origin-partly-lies-in-cia-and-nsa-research-grants-for-mass-surveillance/ https://qz.com/1145669/googles-true-origin-partly-lies-in-ci...
  - hollerith 8y ago
    The QZ article says that >In the mid 1990s, . . . from a place that would come to be known as Silicon Valley In the mid 1990s the name Silicon Valley had been used in mainstream media for at least a dozen years.
    - Zenst 8y ago
      Very true, cousin worked there in early 80's, probably not best source, but was first that jumped out and common knowledge amongst those old enough and into tech at the time to remember. Was the aspect how they engaged with government bureaucracy and managed to in effect define a work culture that is so far removed from governmental bureaucracy, that you wonder what the early days was like.
- mzs 8y ago
  I disagree. For example AV had image search before google, not very good but not for lack of effort. If anything the lack of focus on the core web search because attention was elsewhere to improve AV in other ways was it's undoing.
EGreg 8y ago
How is it that you could refresh your supplementary index and then couldn’t?
- BryantD 8y ago
  Two indexes: the supplemental index (refreshed frequently) and the main index (refreshed less often). The latter is the one that wasn't refreshed for an unusually long period of time.
EGreg 8y ago
And what was his first company?
- carrja99 8y ago
  Zip2 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zip2 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zip2
  - zepearl 8y ago
    >> Zip2 allowed for two-way communication between users and advertisers. Users could message advertisers and have that message forwarded to their fax machine. Likewise, advertisers could fax users and users could view that fax using specific URLs Ha, never heard about that - sounds contorted (nowadays) but somehow funny - so somebody in some company was sitting next to a fax waiting for something to come out of it, then when that happened the employee wrote the reply (scribbled on the same or another piece of paper) and faxed back the reply? I wonder if I would like or hate doing something like that today - waiting for & finally seeing a piece of paper containing an unknown message coming out of a device sounds somehow fascinating... :)
    - reaperducer 8y ago
      I wonder if I would like or hate doing something like that today - waiting for & finally seeing a piece of paper containing an unknown message coming out of a device sounds somehow fascinating... :) Just get a job at any restaurant in Japan. Fax is the way nearly all to-go orders are placed. Fax machines are still massively popular there.
agumonkey 8y ago
was it ever considered to make altavista non-free ? even for advanced use-cases ? or follow google ads strategy ? giving away a free demo of <company> prowess is cool, but it's a big reason for its death I guess
beagle3 8y ago
PageRank is using the stationary distribution of a random walk; that’s very different than just incoming links (which AV did have) In a way, it ranks a link by its own incoming links (which are ranked by their incoming links etc). It was possible to game AV by setting up 100 sites that points to your own. In pagerank, you essentially had to convince already popular pages to link to yours. For a while, google effectively had no spam, and AV had lots. Eventually, spammers learned to game pagerank; the arms race is still on.
- amelius 8y ago
  Page rank is just one way to order pages. Another is relevance. How you combine the two ordering schemes is another big question.
  - miketuritzin 8y ago
    Good point - pagerank is a query-independent signal which is harder to game, but the (very large) part of ranking that is query dependent was still very much gameable.
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
- davesque 8y ago
  I do seem to recall AV getting flooded with spam --- porn spam to be exact. I remember myself and all the nerd kids in my high school computer lab would joke that you could search for something completely innocuous like "yarn" and always get back at least a couple of porn links. This of course was also at a time when "whitehouse.com" was a porn site.
  - scarface74 8y ago
    It might have been funny if you were in school, but if you were at work that’s a different story.
therein 8y ago
> Also, any AV article which doesn't note that we bought Elon Musk's first company is inherently flawed. ;) Agreed. My previous manager had worked with Elon Musk at Zip2 (maybe even as the CTO). He used to talk about how peculiar Elon is. Does it ring a bell who I might be talking about? :)
- nickfromseattle 8y ago
  I also have a friend who was on the leadership team @ Zip2 and the stories I heard about Elon were hilarious. Unfortunately they remain unpublished, which is a shame, because they are really good.
porpoisely 8y ago
I suppose that could be one of the reasons, but I believe the main reason was google won over CS students in high school and college in the late 90s and early 00s. I was introduced to google in high school because it was the best search engine for looking up programming code for my CS classes. Better than altavista, excite, etc. And naturally the word spread, not to mention the people maintaining computers, labs, etc all set google as the default search engine. Sadly, now google is a terrible mess of moderated and curated nonsense.
- autokad 8y ago
  I think Google got its big break when yahoo used them and allowed Google to put a 'powered by Google' button. I clicked it and never stopped using google
  - samstave 8y ago
    IT was responsible for setting thousands of machines default pages to Google through all our system images from an IT Desktop support perspective - this was because Yahoo's frontpage was an utter hideous mess - and it was the minimalistic portal to the internet that worked way better for the users in the companies I worked at then.
  - porpoisely 8y ago
    Absolutely that helped in gaining a wider audience. But I suspect the reason yahoo chose google was because all their tech people preferred google because they all used it to search for code. Maybe it's my high school or my college, but google won over the CS crowd very quickly. Their clean interface and their ability to get the code we were searching for to help us with our homework really gave them a leg up. Then their gmail ( especially the initial invite and storage ) and chrome made google the "cool" tech company and pretty much cemented their place in the tech world. Sadly, they've turned out to be monsters rather than saints and we are all the worse off for it.
    - simonh 8y ago
      I'm not happy about everything Google does, but I don't actually feel worse off. I use their search dozens of times a day, I rely on GMail and Google Maps, Google Docs is fantastic. It's hard sell to convince me that I am worse off due to the existence and my use of Google products.
didip 8y ago
> Also, any AV article which doesn't note that we bought Elon Musk's first company is inherently flawed. ;) I have always wondered what Zip2 actually was. Can you shed some lights? Was it like a primitive version of Yelp? Did the map work like Google Maps?
cpeterso 8y ago
From the article: "[Alta Vista] broadened the use of boolean operators in search. Like some competing search engines, it supported AND, OR, and NOT." My recollection is that Alta Vista supported boolean operators, but defaulted to OR while Google defaulted to AND. So searching Alta Vista for something like "$CommonWord $UncommonWord" would return results with high-ranking pages for $CommonWord that drown out all the low-scoring pages for $UncommonWord, whereas Google would return results that match the intersection (which would actually be relevant to the user's query). I'm convinced this default might have made a bigger impact on Google's success than any PageRank magic.
- jandrese 8y ago
  I've long believed that default OR in keyword searches is always a mistake, and the default should always be AND. The reason being you can just search twice if you want either word, but in the vast majority of cases you want both words when you enter them in the searchbox. Most companies kind of split the difference and put the AND results first then fill in with OR results, but that mostly just leads to "if your answer isn't on the first page, it's not going to be on the second or the hundredth".
  - saalweachter 8y ago
    Amazon's "Whatever, here's some products you'll probably buy that are totally unrelated to your search" back-fill has always filled me with rage.
    - dukoid 8y ago
      At least there it's obvious... If you search for a product with a specific feature you are easily screwed without noticing until later... :(
  - guiambros 8y ago
    I had an ISP at the time, and remember teaching users to always search on AV using "keyword1 AND keyword2", to get the results they expected. When Google came around, this became unnecessary. IMO this was one of the biggest contributors to the perceived quality advantage of Google vs AV.
jasode 8y ago
>one of the primary reasons for AV's demise -- we didn't update our primary index for several months just as Google [...] I'd say that our failure to maintain a high quality index was directly caused by our loss of focus, Do you believe Google's strategic decision to use commodity computers and hard drives gave them any competitive advantage (cheaper cost, scaling, etc) compared to DEC Alpha servers? As an outsider, it seems like Google could iterate its data centers faster and cheaper and therefore, their web crawlers were cheaper to run (also run more frequently), also cheaper to store terabytes of data, and also cheaper to service search queries.
- ddebernardy 8y ago
  Not the OP, but I remember the early 2000s. Just spitballing here but IMO that made no difference whatsoever from a consumer's standpoint -- but it presumably did from an operational standpoint, given how Google introduced an actual business model to search. The only things that mattered to you as a consumer then was how good the results were, and how convenient it was to get them. Google had a clear edge by the end of 2000 insofar as I can recollect.
  - jasode 8y ago
    >but IMO that made no difference whatsoever from a consumer's standpoint. With cheaper techniques, the idea is that the "more capital efficient" way of indexing the ever-expanding web would in turn provide better results for an improved consumer experience. It's the old adage of "do more with less". For example, see the old Danny Sullivan graphs[0] showing how Google's index was growing faster than AltaVista. Having a bigger index lets one return more relevant search hits. AltaVista wasn't just falling behind in "staleness" of old indexes; the aggregate size of the index was smaller than Google as well. [0] https://searchenginewatch.com/sew/study/2068075/search-engine-sizes https://searchenginewatch.com/sew/study/2068075/search-engin...
    - BryantD 8y ago
      True, but after the period I'm thinking of. By 2001 when the layoffs started hitting hard, Google already had a massive advantage.
gwbas1c 8y ago
I wouldn't say it was just the index issue that allowed Google to take prominence. It was the browser toolbar that really killed AltaVista. I didn't know anything about Google until mid 2000, and when I used it, I just thought it was an AltaVista clone. Fast forward to fall 2000, and once after getting bad results on AltaVista, I tried Google again. At the time, I never bookmarked either of the sites or set them as my homepage. I remember, when I used Google, I thought to myself, "I'm going to switch to whoever comes out with a browser toolbar. Search should just be part of the browser." About a week later, I had some bad results on AltaVista, and typed in google.com. Immediately I saw the "try our toolbar" banner. At that point, I switched to Google, and I NEVER went back to AltaVista. (I think sometime in 2001 I tried AltaVista again, out of loyalty, to see if they finally had a toolbar, but the results were so bad I was in shock.)
- Noumenon72 8y ago
  I was expecting you to say Google won because it didn't put out one of those adware toolbars crowding your browser. I would never install one of those. I just put Google as my home page.
  - ramraj07 8y ago
    Times were different back then. And unlike other toolbars I distinctly remember Google's toolbar being actually useful and worth the space.
    - unilynx 8y ago
      Only installed it because it was the easiest way to look up a page's pagerank. Surprised that it still exists! https://www.google.com/intl/nl/toolbar/ie/index.html https://www.google.com/intl/nl/toolbar/ie/index.html - and the screenshot even seems to show a "share to google+" :)
fishingisfun 8y ago
interesting stuff. Where are most of you guys now a days? since you were involved with search
- BryantD 8y ago
  All over. I didn't stick in search; I wound up working in online games for a long time. David Henke, who ran engineering and operations as a whole for a while, went on to Yahoo and then LinkedIn. Barry Rubinson went to Transmeta -- remember them? David Bills is at AWS now. Mike Burrows, who was and is an incredible engineer, is being brilliant at Google. Etc.
jeremyjh 8y ago
I don't remember stale indexes being a problem with AltaVista, its interesting to hear about that. When I switched to Google, it was because I was reliably finding good results within the first few entries. I'd forgotten about it until now, but it used to be a normal thing to page through several screens of search results - performing some kind of human relevance/ranking task on results that were simply too noisy. From the article: > This move away from AltaVista’s streamlined search experience made AltaVista more similar to its competitors. Users gradually began to switch to a newcomer, Google, for the simple search they missed. I don't think this was the case at all. People switched because they got better results.
- sethammons 8y ago
  This was my experience too. Simply better results on the first or (rarely) second page. Also the clean ui. Just an image and a search box. Fantastic on a slow connection.
groestl 8y ago
We had a really slow internet connection at school. So when one of my colleagues introduced us to Google with it's clean interface, we all moved over from a handful of other search engines, and never went back. I can't remember the index being a problem back then.
petercooper 8y ago
we didn't update our primary index for several months just as Google was gaining mindshare I'm glad this has been mentioned. I noticed this at the time but never really knew if it was actually the case! Altavista had become somewhat annoying to use at the time and Google's relatively clean front page (although it was more than just a search box in the earliest days, but it was cleaner than AV's) meant it loaded quicker and sold me on both speed and that the results actually loaded.
coldtea 8y ago
>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. And the guy who started Baidu (the Google of China), Robin Li, had created his similar to PageRank algorithm, and even patented it in the US, before Google (he filled for the patent in 1997, Google was founded in 1998). However, Kaiser Kuo points out that Robin Li, the co-founder of Baidu, obtained a patent for hypertext link analysis before Larry Page obtained his “Page Rank” version.
emmelaich 8y ago
My recollection was that as soon as anyone - but especially techies - tried Google even once they never went back. The lack of fresh index surely was a factor but not sure whether it was primary. Obvious question - why did you not update the index? Was it that it was obvious Google was going to win and made people give up? (edit - never mind - you address this in other comments)
- james_s_tayler 8y ago
  I was like 11 at the time. My IT teacher taught it to us in class. I still remember it. Never went back.
- takeda 8y ago
  > My recollection was that as soon as anyone - but especially techies - tried Google even once they never went back. > The lack of fresh index surely was a factor but not sure whether it was primary. I wasn't aware about index back then, but I saw broken links, at that time I thought that was normal, that it takes time to scan the entire Internet. With Google I generally got working websites. I did like the boolean search in AV, it helped with obscure searches, especially when name was similar to a typo of a popular word.
sfcguyus 8y ago
Nah mate. Used AltaVista. The switchover had nothing to do with 404s or 'freshness'. Google was just easier in that day. You'd assume it was something technical that you could have altered but from a user perspective I highly doubt it had much relevance.
mda 8y ago
Freshness? I remember terrible spam and irrelevant results that plagued and killed it. Google was miles better on all aspects.
anticensor 8y ago
Why did you not consider promoting the latest supplemental index into being main one and trigger reindexing?
- BryantD 8y ago
  The supplemental index was relatively tiny -- just new pages.
xtat 8y ago
Fascinating reply ^^ it seems with every corporate story there's the memorable story people took away and the thing that actually happened

Infernal 8y ago

Why was that primary index not updated for those several months? What happened that led to that?

Zenst 8y ago
I 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 ago
BryantD responded to a similar question in another thread (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19172762 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19172762).

CydeWeys 8y ago

Why didn't you update your primary index for several months? Were there serious technical breakages?

BryantD 8y ago
Internal issues I'm not comfortable talking about in depth. It was a combination of technical problems and political problems; I expect any specific person's opinion of the percentage breakdown of those factors depends a lot on which group they were in at the time.
- reificator 8y ago
  > I expect any specific person's opinion of the percentage breakdown of those factors depends a lot on which group they were in at the time. I feel like that tells me where your percentage would lie... EDIT: I apologize, it was intended as a joke to lighten the mood. It's never a good thing to lose one's job or have a company fail, even that long ago, so my response is to attempt humor.
  - JadeNB 8y ago
    > > I expect any specific person's opinion of the percentage breakdown of those factors depends a lot on which group they were in at the time. > I feel like that tells me where your percentage would lie... Are you responding to BryantD's admission of (widespread) bias by accusing BryantD of bias? This seems to add nothing to the conversation.
    - reificator 8y ago
      I apologize, it was intended as a joke to lighten the mood. It's never a good thing to lose one's job or have a company fail, even that long ago, so my response is to attempt humor.
      - JadeNB 8y ago
        > I apologize, it was intended as a joke to lighten the mood. It's never a good thing to lose one's job or have a company fail, even that long ago, so my response is to attempt humor. I see; I incorrectly read it as accusatory. Thanks for the very civil reply!

new12345 8y ago

I feel that Google brought in a shift in thinking of internet companies. In pre-google era, companies operated like an government office, once they gain marked foot hold they virtually stop enhancing their products. Google and other successful startups have taught us that a tech company is prone to fall if it doesn't innovate.

Zenst 8y ago
Which is kinda ironic given Google was born on the back of a DARPA contract :- https://qz.com/1145669/googles-true-origin-partly-lies-in-cia-and-nsa-research-grants-for-mass-surveillance/ https://qz.com/1145669/googles-true-origin-partly-lies-in-ci...
- hollerith 8y ago
  The QZ article says that >In the mid 1990s, . . . from a place that would come to be known as Silicon Valley In the mid 1990s the name Silicon Valley had been used in mainstream media for at least a dozen years.
  - Zenst 8y ago
    Very true, cousin worked there in early 80's, probably not best source, but was first that jumped out and common knowledge amongst those old enough and into tech at the time to remember. Was the aspect how they engaged with government bureaucracy and managed to in effect define a work culture that is so far removed from governmental bureaucracy, that you wonder what the early days was like.
mzs 8y ago
I disagree. For example AV had image search before google, not very good but not for lack of effort. If anything the lack of focus on the core web search because attention was elsewhere to improve AV in other ways was it's undoing.

EGreg 8y ago

How is it that you could refresh your supplementary index and then couldn’t?

BryantD 8y ago
Two indexes: the supplemental index (refreshed frequently) and the main index (refreshed less often). The latter is the one that wasn't refreshed for an unusually long period of time.

EGreg 8y ago

And what was his first company?

carrja99 8y ago
Zip2 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zip2 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zip2
- zepearl 8y ago
  >> Zip2 allowed for two-way communication between users and advertisers. Users could message advertisers and have that message forwarded to their fax machine. Likewise, advertisers could fax users and users could view that fax using specific URLs Ha, never heard about that - sounds contorted (nowadays) but somehow funny - so somebody in some company was sitting next to a fax waiting for something to come out of it, then when that happened the employee wrote the reply (scribbled on the same or another piece of paper) and faxed back the reply? I wonder if I would like or hate doing something like that today - waiting for & finally seeing a piece of paper containing an unknown message coming out of a device sounds somehow fascinating... :)
  - reaperducer 8y ago
    I wonder if I would like or hate doing something like that today - waiting for & finally seeing a piece of paper containing an unknown message coming out of a device sounds somehow fascinating... :) Just get a job at any restaurant in Japan. Fax is the way nearly all to-go orders are placed. Fax machines are still massively popular there.

agumonkey 8y ago

was it ever considered to make altavista non-free ? even for advanced use-cases ? or follow google ads strategy ? giving away a free demo of <company> prowess is cool, but it's a big reason for its death I guess

beagle3 8y ago

PageRank is using the stationary distribution of a random walk; that’s very different than just incoming links (which AV did have) In a way, it ranks a link by its own incoming links (which are ranked by their incoming links etc). It was possible to game AV by setting up 100 sites that points to your own. In pagerank, you essentially had to convince already popular pages to link to yours. For a while, google effectively had no spam, and AV had lots. Eventually, spammers learned to game pagerank; the arms race is still on.

amelius 8y ago
Page rank is just one way to order pages. Another is relevance. How you combine the two ordering schemes is another big question.
- miketuritzin 8y ago
  Good point - pagerank is a query-independent signal which is harder to game, but the (very large) part of ranking that is query dependent was still very much gameable.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
davesque 8y ago
I do seem to recall AV getting flooded with spam --- porn spam to be exact. I remember myself and all the nerd kids in my high school computer lab would joke that you could search for something completely innocuous like "yarn" and always get back at least a couple of porn links. This of course was also at a time when "whitehouse.com" was a porn site.
- scarface74 8y ago
  It might have been funny if you were in school, but if you were at work that’s a different story.

therein 8y ago

> Also, any AV article which doesn't note that we bought Elon Musk's first company is inherently flawed. ;) Agreed. My previous manager had worked with Elon Musk at Zip2 (maybe even as the CTO). He used to talk about how peculiar Elon is. Does it ring a bell who I might be talking about? :)

nickfromseattle 8y ago
I also have a friend who was on the leadership team @ Zip2 and the stories I heard about Elon were hilarious. Unfortunately they remain unpublished, which is a shame, because they are really good.

porpoisely 8y ago

I suppose that could be one of the reasons, but I believe the main reason was google won over CS students in high school and college in the late 90s and early 00s. I was introduced to google in high school because it was the best search engine for looking up programming code for my CS classes. Better than altavista, excite, etc. And naturally the word spread, not to mention the people maintaining computers, labs, etc all set google as the default search engine. Sadly, now google is a terrible mess of moderated and curated nonsense.

autokad 8y ago
I think Google got its big break when yahoo used them and allowed Google to put a 'powered by Google' button. I clicked it and never stopped using google
- samstave 8y ago
  IT was responsible for setting thousands of machines default pages to Google through all our system images from an IT Desktop support perspective - this was because Yahoo's frontpage was an utter hideous mess - and it was the minimalistic portal to the internet that worked way better for the users in the companies I worked at then.
- porpoisely 8y ago
  Absolutely that helped in gaining a wider audience. But I suspect the reason yahoo chose google was because all their tech people preferred google because they all used it to search for code. Maybe it's my high school or my college, but google won over the CS crowd very quickly. Their clean interface and their ability to get the code we were searching for to help us with our homework really gave them a leg up. Then their gmail ( especially the initial invite and storage ) and chrome made google the "cool" tech company and pretty much cemented their place in the tech world. Sadly, they've turned out to be monsters rather than saints and we are all the worse off for it.
  - simonh 8y ago
    I'm not happy about everything Google does, but I don't actually feel worse off. I use their search dozens of times a day, I rely on GMail and Google Maps, Google Docs is fantastic. It's hard sell to convince me that I am worse off due to the existence and my use of Google products.

didip 8y ago

> Also, any AV article which doesn't note that we bought Elon Musk's first company is inherently flawed. ;) I have always wondered what Zip2 actually was. Can you shed some lights? Was it like a primitive version of Yelp? Did the map work like Google Maps?

cpeterso 8y ago

From the article: "[Alta Vista] broadened the use of boolean operators in search. Like some competing search engines, it supported AND, OR, and NOT." My recollection is that Alta Vista supported boolean operators, but defaulted to OR while Google defaulted to AND. So searching Alta Vista for something like "$CommonWord $UncommonWord" would return results with high-ranking pages for $CommonWord that drown out all the low-scoring pages for $UncommonWord, whereas Google would return results that match the intersection (which would actually be relevant to the user's query). I'm convinced this default might have made a bigger impact on Google's success than any PageRank magic.

jandrese 8y ago
I've long believed that default OR in keyword searches is always a mistake, and the default should always be AND. The reason being you can just search twice if you want either word, but in the vast majority of cases you want both words when you enter them in the searchbox. Most companies kind of split the difference and put the AND results first then fill in with OR results, but that mostly just leads to "if your answer isn't on the first page, it's not going to be on the second or the hundredth".
- saalweachter 8y ago
  Amazon's "Whatever, here's some products you'll probably buy that are totally unrelated to your search" back-fill has always filled me with rage.
  - dukoid 8y ago
    At least there it's obvious... If you search for a product with a specific feature you are easily screwed without noticing until later... :(
- guiambros 8y ago
  I had an ISP at the time, and remember teaching users to always search on AV using "keyword1 AND keyword2", to get the results they expected. When Google came around, this became unnecessary. IMO this was one of the biggest contributors to the perceived quality advantage of Google vs AV.

jasode 8y ago

>one of the primary reasons for AV's demise -- we didn't update our primary index for several months just as Google [...] I'd say that our failure to maintain a high quality index was directly caused by our loss of focus, Do you believe Google's strategic decision to use commodity computers and hard drives gave them any competitive advantage (cheaper cost, scaling, etc) compared to DEC Alpha servers? As an outsider, it seems like Google could iterate its data centers faster and cheaper and therefore, their web crawlers were cheaper to run (also run more frequently), also cheaper to store terabytes of data, and also cheaper to service search queries.

ddebernardy 8y ago
Not the OP, but I remember the early 2000s. Just spitballing here but IMO that made no difference whatsoever from a consumer's standpoint -- but it presumably did from an operational standpoint, given how Google introduced an actual business model to search. The only things that mattered to you as a consumer then was how good the results were, and how convenient it was to get them. Google had a clear edge by the end of 2000 insofar as I can recollect.
- jasode 8y ago
  >but IMO that made no difference whatsoever from a consumer's standpoint. With cheaper techniques, the idea is that the "more capital efficient" way of indexing the ever-expanding web would in turn provide better results for an improved consumer experience. It's the old adage of "do more with less". For example, see the old Danny Sullivan graphs[0] showing how Google's index was growing faster than AltaVista. Having a bigger index lets one return more relevant search hits. AltaVista wasn't just falling behind in "staleness" of old indexes; the aggregate size of the index was smaller than Google as well. [0] https://searchenginewatch.com/sew/study/2068075/search-engine-sizes https://searchenginewatch.com/sew/study/2068075/search-engin...
  - BryantD 8y ago
    True, but after the period I'm thinking of. By 2001 when the layoffs started hitting hard, Google already had a massive advantage.

gwbas1c 8y ago

I wouldn't say it was just the index issue that allowed Google to take prominence. It was the browser toolbar that really killed AltaVista. I didn't know anything about Google until mid 2000, and when I used it, I just thought it was an AltaVista clone. Fast forward to fall 2000, and once after getting bad results on AltaVista, I tried Google again. At the time, I never bookmarked either of the sites or set them as my homepage. I remember, when I used Google, I thought to myself, "I'm going to switch to whoever comes out with a browser toolbar. Search should just be part of the browser." About a week later, I had some bad results on AltaVista, and typed in google.com. Immediately I saw the "try our toolbar" banner. At that point, I switched to Google, and I NEVER went back to AltaVista. (I think sometime in 2001 I tried AltaVista again, out of loyalty, to see if they finally had a toolbar, but the results were so bad I was in shock.)

Noumenon72 8y ago
I was expecting you to say Google won because it didn't put out one of those adware toolbars crowding your browser. I would never install one of those. I just put Google as my home page.
- ramraj07 8y ago
  Times were different back then. And unlike other toolbars I distinctly remember Google's toolbar being actually useful and worth the space.
  - unilynx 8y ago
    Only installed it because it was the easiest way to look up a page's pagerank. Surprised that it still exists! https://www.google.com/intl/nl/toolbar/ie/index.html https://www.google.com/intl/nl/toolbar/ie/index.html - and the screenshot even seems to show a "share to google+" :)

fishingisfun 8y ago

interesting stuff. Where are most of you guys now a days? since you were involved with search

BryantD 8y ago
All over. I didn't stick in search; I wound up working in online games for a long time. David Henke, who ran engineering and operations as a whole for a while, went on to Yahoo and then LinkedIn. Barry Rubinson went to Transmeta -- remember them? David Bills is at AWS now. Mike Burrows, who was and is an incredible engineer, is being brilliant at Google. Etc.

jeremyjh 8y ago

I don't remember stale indexes being a problem with AltaVista, its interesting to hear about that. When I switched to Google, it was because I was reliably finding good results within the first few entries. I'd forgotten about it until now, but it used to be a normal thing to page through several screens of search results - performing some kind of human relevance/ranking task on results that were simply too noisy. From the article: > This move away from AltaVista’s streamlined search experience made AltaVista more similar to its competitors. Users gradually began to switch to a newcomer, Google, for the simple search they missed. I don't think this was the case at all. People switched because they got better results.

sethammons 8y ago
This was my experience too. Simply better results on the first or (rarely) second page. Also the clean ui. Just an image and a search box. Fantastic on a slow connection.

groestl 8y ago

We had a really slow internet connection at school. So when one of my colleagues introduced us to Google with it's clean interface, we all moved over from a handful of other search engines, and never went back. I can't remember the index being a problem back then.

petercooper 8y ago

we didn't update our primary index for several months just as Google was gaining mindshare I'm glad this has been mentioned. I noticed this at the time but never really knew if it was actually the case! Altavista had become somewhat annoying to use at the time and Google's relatively clean front page (although it was more than just a search box in the earliest days, but it was cleaner than AV's) meant it loaded quicker and sold me on both speed and that the results actually loaded.

coldtea 8y ago

>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. And the guy who started Baidu (the Google of China), Robin Li, had created his similar to PageRank algorithm, and even patented it in the US, before Google (he filled for the patent in 1997, Google was founded in 1998). However, Kaiser Kuo points out that Robin Li, the co-founder of Baidu, obtained a patent for hypertext link analysis before Larry Page obtained his “Page Rank” version.

emmelaich 8y ago

My recollection was that as soon as anyone - but especially techies - tried Google even once they never went back. The lack of fresh index surely was a factor but not sure whether it was primary. Obvious question - why did you not update the index? Was it that it was obvious Google was going to win and made people give up? (edit - never mind - you address this in other comments)

james_s_tayler 8y ago
I was like 11 at the time. My IT teacher taught it to us in class. I still remember it. Never went back.
takeda 8y ago
> My recollection was that as soon as anyone - but especially techies - tried Google even once they never went back. > The lack of fresh index surely was a factor but not sure whether it was primary. I wasn't aware about index back then, but I saw broken links, at that time I thought that was normal, that it takes time to scan the entire Internet. With Google I generally got working websites. I did like the boolean search in AV, it helped with obscure searches, especially when name was similar to a typo of a popular word.

sfcguyus 8y ago

Nah mate. Used AltaVista. The switchover had nothing to do with 404s or 'freshness'. Google was just easier in that day. You'd assume it was something technical that you could have altered but from a user perspective I highly doubt it had much relevance.

mda 8y ago

Freshness? I remember terrible spam and irrelevant results that plagued and killed it. Google was miles better on all aspects.

anticensor 8y ago

Why did you not consider promoting the latest supplemental index into being main one and trigger reindexing?

BryantD 8y ago
The supplemental index was relatively tiny -- just new pages.

xtat 8y ago

Fascinating reply ^^ it seems with every corporate story there's the memorable story people took away and the thing that actually happened