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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 recoll

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.
- teddyh 8y ago
  > 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". Relevant xkcd about the “second page of Google results” effect: https://xkcd.com/1334/ https://xkcd.com/1334/
- sytelus 8y ago
  It’s not always a mistake. The OR or AND just provides initial filter and then you get to rank pages and take top N. If your ranking algorithm put a lot of weight on the fact that all words exist then you can get same result as AND but with benefit that if no page exist then you may suggest something. It also depends on how you present these results.
BryantD 8y ago
I can't remember one way or another but I think you're right about the importance of the defaults.
anyfoo 8y ago
Although it's very much anecdotical, I, too, distinctly remember that Google defaulted to AND (unlike today, a very hard AND at the time), and that this made a noticeable difference in searching habits. My theory on why this might matter even for people who knew how to use the operators is this: With OR as default, you would first try your query without operators, get page upon page of irrelevant results, and then start to narrow your query down. With AND as the default, you would type in the query, and if you only got a few irrelevant results, or often no results at all, you would try alternative terms instead. It seems that progressing from no result to desired results by choosing alternative terms just makes more sense than having to wade through irrelevant stuff, and the default encourages one methodology over the other. Today, it's very hard to make Google return no results at all. Not just because the amount of content grew to an unimaginable scale in the meantime, but also because Google has become way, way fuzzier in the way it interprets search terms, likely to better suit a larger and different audience. A lot of times today, I have to switch to "verbatim" mode first, at least for technical stuff.
- grkvlt 8y ago
  The problem with AND as a default is that 'normal' people (i.e. people who have no idea what boolean means) operate search engines something like this: 1. type some words in, and get no or incorrect results; 2. add some extra words, and repeat the search, with the idea they are making the search more specific; 3. be confused as to why they still don't get the results they want. a default of OR, on the other hand, means adding search terms ends up being useful...
  - ramraj07 8y ago
    As someone old enough to have used search engines extensively myself and watching over others using it during the AV - Google transition, I can definitely say that defaulting to AND was one of the most important reasons Google appeared to give better results than AV for both advanced and basic folk.
  - skj 8y ago
    Defaulting to AND means that you aren't just searching for the most common term in your query that drowns out the rest. Also, adding terms narrows the query down rather than making it more general. This behavior strikes me as far more natural for "normal" people.
systemBuilder 8y ago
Alta Vista defaulted to AND. Crappy search engines like Excite defaulted to OR because it's easier to serve up a lot of low quality results in an OR search. Moreover Alta Vista had "NEAR" which made it unique among search engines. It always took 2 to 5 searches using Altavista to get the results you were looking for. This was a huge improvement on Excite and Lycos which might produce infinite results with absolutely nothing relevant. There was a lot of noise like source code archives. With Google search the first page usually had a useful result. Probably the biggest thing that destroyed Alta Vista was the horrible flashing banner Ads at the top of the screen.

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.
teddyh 8y ago
> 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". Relevant xkcd about the “second page of Google results” effect: https://xkcd.com/1334/ https://xkcd.com/1334/
sytelus 8y ago
It’s not always a mistake. The OR or AND just provides initial filter and then you get to rank pages and take top N. If your ranking algorithm put a lot of weight on the fact that all words exist then you can get same result as AND but with benefit that if no page exist then you may suggest something. It also depends on how you present these results.

BryantD 8y ago

I can't remember one way or another but I think you're right about the importance of the defaults.

anyfoo 8y ago

Although it's very much anecdotical, I, too, distinctly remember that Google defaulted to AND (unlike today, a very hard AND at the time), and that this made a noticeable difference in searching habits. My theory on why this might matter even for people who knew how to use the operators is this: With OR as default, you would first try your query without operators, get page upon page of irrelevant results, and then start to narrow your query down. With AND as the default, you would type in the query, and if you only got a few irrelevant results, or often no results at all, you would try alternative terms instead. It seems that progressing from no result to desired results by choosing alternative terms just makes more sense than having to wade through irrelevant stuff, and the default encourages one methodology over the other. Today, it's very hard to make Google return no results at all. Not just because the amount of content grew to an unimaginable scale in the meantime, but also because Google has become way, way fuzzier in the way it interprets search terms, likely to better suit a larger and different audience. A lot of times today, I have to switch to "verbatim" mode first, at least for technical stuff.

grkvlt 8y ago
The problem with AND as a default is that 'normal' people (i.e. people who have no idea what boolean means) operate search engines something like this: 1. type some words in, and get no or incorrect results; 2. add some extra words, and repeat the search, with the idea they are making the search more specific; 3. be confused as to why they still don't get the results they want. a default of OR, on the other hand, means adding search terms ends up being useful...
- ramraj07 8y ago
  As someone old enough to have used search engines extensively myself and watching over others using it during the AV - Google transition, I can definitely say that defaulting to AND was one of the most important reasons Google appeared to give better results than AV for both advanced and basic folk.
- skj 8y ago
  Defaulting to AND means that you aren't just searching for the most common term in your query that drowns out the rest. Also, adding terms narrows the query down rather than making it more general. This behavior strikes me as far more natural for "normal" people.

systemBuilder 8y ago

Alta Vista defaulted to AND. Crappy search engines like Excite defaulted to OR because it's easier to serve up a lot of low quality results in an OR search. Moreover Alta Vista had "NEAR" which made it unique among search engines. It always took 2 to 5 searches using Altavista to get the results you were looking for. This was a huge improvement on Excite and Lycos which might produce infinite results with absolutely nothing relevant. There was a lot of noise like source code archives. With Google search the first page usually had a useful result. Probably the biggest thing that destroyed Alta Vista was the horrible flashing banner Ads at the top of the screen.