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. M

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.