24 ms·

How AltaVista, the first good search engine, fell into the digital abyss

349 points by chris_f 6y ago

llaolleh 6y ago
Am I the only one who thinks this article is very poorly written? It doesn't really tell all the strategic reasons why Altavista fell into oblivion and its structure is all over the place. I also love Paul Graham's framework for imagining the future and working backwards. If we think like that, Google is nowhere near the form of a final solution to information retrieval. An ideal state would be to retrieve information correct the first time with everything you need bundled into the page. If that problem is solved, then you have to tackle the question of why the user was asking the query in the first place, and how your product can help people have a solution to their answer so that the query is never repeated!
decasteve 6y ago
What drew me to AltaVista was that it gave me results that didn't exist elsewhere. It took some boolean gymnastics to get precise results, or going a few pages deep, but stuff, if it existed, was findable. I almost wish there were less precise and more obscure options out there today. A search engine that purposefully didn't index mainstream news, social media, nor shopping/product sites.
- rangersanger 6y ago
  I would happily pay $5 a month For an ad free search engine that didn’t index Pinterest.
  - kordlessagain 6y ago
    Working on it.
    - slater 6y ago
      Oh?
  - jeffbee 6y ago
    Honestly wouldn’t it be against EU antitrust policy to explicitly do this?
    - dotancohen 6y ago
      It would work if instead of deindexing Pintrest specifically, the end user could enter a list of sites that they wish to never see results for.
  - dotancohen 6y ago
    I'm with you on this. I would pay far less, $1/month would be the point where I would begin considering it. There are just too many "only $5" services and they would add up quickly if I were to allow myself that amount of money. The problem with this model, though, is support. A service with 100 million untrained end users each paying a dollar will need to provide quality customer service to 100 million untrained end users. It is much easier to sell ads to 10,000 "affiliates" who feel that they have some special arrangement and thus accept some responsibility of their own, and make $10,000 off each of those.
    - true_religion 6y ago
      I agree there are too many $5 services, but a search engine is something that I use every waking hour of my day. I get so much use from it, that $5 per month is a bargin. I would definitely pay Google just to be able to remove some sites permanently from my results. They're just spam to me, even if Google thinks they are legitimate.
    - freedomben 6y ago
      Yes, exactly right. If people are paying any amount at all they expect it to work and work perfectly. I'm not saying that's unreasonable, but it does quickly become unfeasible at scale with users who have no training at all. Then on top of that the skimming the payment processors do makes a large percentage of that $1/month go to transaction fees. Charging yearly helps with that but many people won't want to do that.
    - Closi 6y ago
      Facebook makes $50 per user per year, so I would assume $1 per month is an order of magnitude less than what google is making from you at the moment. $10 per month is probably more realistic.
  - enriquto 6y ago
    I'd love an option to setup domains where no search results are to be returned. Of course pinterest, but also quora, (and sometimes reddit), etc.
    - pault 6y ago
      -site:Pinterest.com
      - mishac 6y ago
        That doesn't work well for me because I get still get pinterest.co.uk, pinterest.ca, pitnerest.it etc etc. I guess we need wildcard domain exlclusion.
        LordNight 6y ago
        The correct command is -inurl:pinterest. Additionally, for those, who likes to add reddit in the search query, i'd also like to recommend " inurl:forum OR inurl:board " (note also that forum and forums gives different results for some reason). Personally, I like to do broad searches on google to discover new stuff, but for the past 7 or 8 years, google often returns ~100 result instead of the usual 1000000+. And, contrary to the logic, adding various inurl: commands actualy gives you more results instead of limiting them and thus significantly improves searching capabilities.
  - dalbasal 6y ago
    I think this can be generalised as "more power to users." You might want to filter Pinterest. OP wants to avoid mainstream news, social media, nor shopping/product sites. This requires users to be involved. Filters, refinement, user preferences. etc etc. Search is a powerful tool, and the power has been growing exponentially since 1995. But, almost all of that power is channeled into instant results, intuitiveness, "sane defaults" and such. All the capabilities are in the background and the assumed user is lowest denominator on all fronts. The low effort, low technical capabilities, low understanding, etc. This is most people (me included) most of the time, but not all of the time. Maybe I want to filter seo spam (like pinterest) more aggressively. Etc. This isn't a slam on google really. One thing can't do everything and the thing google search does is what most people need most of the time. It's definitely the thing that makes the most money. But... none of a search engines power has been channeled into making search a power tool. It's a tool that everyone uses many times per day, but there is no learning curve. No getting better. You can't really invest effort and get rewarded for that effort. Pity really, all this power is there. It's right under the surface. Let us be more than the lazy, dumb user sometimes. Google have reversed the User Interface paradigm. Instead of users learning the software and telling it what to do, the software learns the user. I don't necessarily mean NNs or personalisation. I mean that the paraign is software-centric. "If the user does X, how should the software respond?" instead of "If the user user wants Y, how does she make the software do it?" That's great for intuitiveness, but it also creates a frame where the software gets better over time but the user never does.
    - visarga 6y ago
      > think this can be generalised as "more power to users." I agree, we need more power to control. There should be more than one recipe for ranking and filtering, and we should have more to say about what information is being hidden from us. Society is diverse, a single formula automatically discriminates some groups. Let people make the choice.
    - abraae 6y ago
      Yeah, I also want filters, refinement, user preferences. etc. And I want it to be social - I want to search using the same filters that Tim Bray uses. Or I want to use the filters that the people use who in aggregate tend to click through to the same results pages that I visit. So much amazing stuff could be done, but here we are controlled by algorithms that treat us all as brain dead sheep who only want to know about what the Kardashians are up to. I suspect that Google knows about these desires, but would prefer the world where everyone is a sheep.
  - disown 6y ago
    or you could just add "-pinterest" to your search query and save yourself $5.
  - layer8 6y ago
    I’m using a search shortcut that just adds “-pinterest” to all searches (and also activates Google verbatim search mode).
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
  - ajnin 6y ago
    I'm using the following User Script to remove specific domains from Google search results. It does the job well enough for me. https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/1682-google-hit-hider-by-domain-search-filter-block-sites https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/1682-google-hit-hider-by-d...
  - kome 6y ago
    google with filters for a dollar a month would be awesome, like a function to "block this domain forever"... it would clean my search results from the annoying offenders. and i would gather user inputted blocked domains data to produce better search results for non subscribing users...
  - mech422 6y ago
    The really annoying part about pinterest, is I never seem to be able to get back to the original directions/plans/whatever. Its like "Hey, look at this cool stuff I won't tell you how to make, even though I swiped it from a HOWTO site"
  - mech422 6y ago
    I would also pay to have google freaking remember my search preferences. You've got my dang account - pull the prefs. from it.
- tams 6y ago
  Not exactly the same approach that you describe, but Million Short allows you to exclude the most popular websites from your search results. https://millionshort.com/ https://millionshort.com/
- _Microft 6y ago
  I wish there were still a search engine that followed my query strings and operators to the letter instead of attempting to be extra clever. Even Bing seems to be doing that no longer.
  - sshagent 6y ago
    oh god yes, that would be nice. I know what i typed stupid search engine, if i put it in quotes...i only want that exact phrase. Don't just cast that aside and search for the words individually.
  - chris_f 6y ago
    We will respect your search query at Runnaroo if you use quotes. Google also has a verbatim search filter, which does a decent job most of the time.
    - dheera 6y ago
      ... until you want to search for something verbatim with quotes in it. Google doesn't seem to respect escaped quotes like "hello \"this\" is a test" which is quite surprising to me considering how they invent programming languages and all.
      - jeffbee 6y ago
        I imagine this is because the punctuation isn’t in their index at all, so it makes no difference how you format the query.
        derefr 6y ago
        Is there an whole-Web search engine that isn’t a fulltext search engine, but rather works more like grepping a virtual text file that contains the entire Internet, such that one could match on punctuation and so forth?
        jeffbee 6y ago
- foobarian 6y ago
  Same, at one point the size of AltaVista's index was vastly above all the competition and was the best place to go for finding obscure stuff. With the boolean filters it was possible to exhaustively search the web. Unfortunately that didn't scale with the size of the web; at one point the amount of pages got large enough that doing a smart ranking like Google did became more effective than the "look at all pages of results" usage required for AltaVista. It felt like a monumental transition, like when a program gets too big for main memory and causes the computer to start swapping to disk.
- dalbasal 6y ago
  >>if it existed, was findable This is really the precedent that mattered, I think. Remember one line of a poem? You can probably find the rest. Recall a Douglas Adams piece about rice farming in Bali or Java or something... you can find it. As you say, it took boolean gymnastics. But, that really just means modifying your search terms and scrolling through some results. Being less powerful than 2020 google kind of put more power/responsibility in users' hands. A user needed to use a search engine like a tool. I want what you want too... Everything google (mail/search/youtube, etc)... but designed for more user effort. Finding the best-for-most result instantly is great, but sometimes you want the tool to help you find a result on page 112 within a few minutes. Bring back a little bit of a directory feel even. Let me narrow down, refine and shape results gradually. Assume that I will rummage through a bunch of crap to find what I want.
- Terretta 6y ago
  Yes... Enjoyed AltaVista and FAST (AllTheWeb)[1] for precision searching. That reminded me of Architext, and EWS (Excite for Web Servers)[2], but a good bit of Googling (ahem) later, seems difficult to find much about most of the mid to late 90s standalone local search engines any more, except perhaps Inktomi. Most are not mentioned in Wikipedia search engine timeline[3]. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Development_Center_Norway https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Development_Center_N... 2. https://www.wired.com/1998/01/excite-moves-to-patch-search-software/ https://www.wired.com/1998/01/excite-moves-to-patch-search-s... 3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_web_search_engines https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_web_search_engines EDIT: Using the search engine Qwant, I was able to find an original EWS (Excite for Web Servers) help page: http://www1.udel.edu/Excite/AT-helpdoc.html http://www1.udel.edu/Excite/AT-helpdoc.html At the time, it was amazingly out of the box: Excite for Web Servers makes it easy for you to add searching -- Excite, Inc.'s advanced concept-based searching -- to your Web site. Excite for Web Servers provides a simple Web-browser interface for doing all the things necessary to enable concept-based searching of collections of documents -- administering, indexing, and searching over the collections. In particular, one can: - define a document collection -- that is, specify a set of documents to be considered a single collection over which one can search, - design customized pages for displaying to users who wish to search over that collection, - index that collection, monitoring the progress, and search the collection. With Excite for Web Servers, it's easy to set up concept-based-searchable Web sites in minutes.
- kevin_thibedeau 6y ago
  The "near" operator was particularly useful.
SubGenius 6y ago
Unrelated, but does anybody remember a site called astalavista.com? It had a lot of script kiddie tools, among them sub7, msn messenger flooders etc. I miss the early internet.
- GekkePrutser 6y ago
  Oh yes I remember it! It was a great place for software serial numbers too.
- 404mm 6y ago
  It was astalavista.box.sk
  - FartyMcFarter 6y ago
    It's on archive.org . Here's a randomly chosen snapshot from 2001: https://web.archive.org/web/20010119175000/http://astalavista.box.sk/ https://web.archive.org/web/20010119175000/http://astalavist...
- slater 6y ago
  came here to check for astalavista mention :D
- unclekev 6y ago
  I remember paying for a membership for their "Premium Security Portal" back in 1999/2000. Got in a lot of trouble at school because of the things I learnt on that site. Good times :)
GekkePrutser 6y ago
Yeah it's a shame. Digital could have been the Google. Probably a much better one (it can't get much worse than Google's privacy invasion, after all).
- olentangy 6y ago
  Coulda, woulda, shoulda. I remember when I left DEC for Apple in the mid-80's and my manager told me I was making a mistake going to work for a company making toy computers. DEC was a true leader during the mini-computer era, but after that nope. Happens to a lot of companies.
  - GekkePrutser 6y ago
    True, they really neglected AltaVista. That was a colossal mistake. They really got stuck in their old mindset.
dalbasal 6y ago
Being a predecessor is not a failure. Au contraire. One of Dawkins' memorable lines is "Descendents are common. Ancestors are exceptionally rare" You could say crocodilians succeeded and dinosaurs failed. A croc is still a croc, but the dinosaurs are hummingbirds and seagulls. If you think about it though, both are ancestors... an exceptional success. Altavista is a Khan.
- KineticLensman 6y ago
  > A croc is still a croc, but the dinosaurs are hummingbirds and seagulls. Slightly off-topic, but I went to Wikipedia to remind myself of the specific category of dinosaur that birds are descended from, and the 'Today's featured article' was about Achelousaurus, a ceratopsid dinosaur! I think this is the first time I've had such a close match to the thing I was interested in. From there, it was just three clicks to the article I needed [0], which, incidentally, stated that "The present scientific consensus is that birds are a group of maniraptoran theropod dinosaurs that originated during the Mesozoic Era". [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Origin_of_birds https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Origin_of_birds
liveoneggs 6y ago
altavista starting serving pop-up and pop-under ads. Google, at the time I switched, was serving tiny text-only ads. Both had good results.
404mm 6y ago
* don’t confuse with astalavista ;)
m3kw9 6y ago
The results were crap and it was slow that’s what killed it. While other alternatives were getting better
- orev 6y ago
  That’s a bit harsh. It was the best thing available at the time, and it held its place for a while, until Google came along. Progress is always about moving from one thing to the next.
- laurent92 6y ago
  Results were crap because pages started doing SEO by stuffing white keywords on white background. If it were relaunched today, it may be efficient. But the whole game is to stay on top of this. DDG provides almost the Google results, yet it feels much less efficient. I think, for the single-box-with-single-keyword-search market, Google is the best we can do, but there might still be room for other search engines. Also, if you need historical, political or medical information, that is 3 domains where Google is already out of the game. There is a lot of room today for a search engine which would only returns technical results and not politically or racially motivated results like Google does (Google had project to promote races other than Whites, and thus, started not returning some results depending on the race of the scientist).
  - iagovar 6y ago
    > Also, if you need historical, political or medical information, that is 3 domains where Google is already out of the game. I find myself using every non-google search engine in this areas. I'm pretty lazy about search engines but it bothered me enough.
chris_f 6y ago
At the time, HotBot was my other go-to search engine. Interesting to see that it is still around, but is now a VPN company.
- petepete 6y ago
  I was a loyal mamma.com user until Google came along. I always liked the quality of results and the UI. They were swallowed up by Copernic who appear to still exist in the desktop search space.
- guytv 6y ago
  ... It's not the same company. The "HotBot" name and domain were sold for $155k in 2016 to an unnamed buyer[0] 0 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HotBot https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HotBot
RoutinePlayer 6y ago
I remember having AltaVista as my primary bookmark, until they accelerated the ads and monetization, and render it almost completely useless. It was so obvious they wanted to make quick, obscene money from of it. They cared very little about the negative impact that had on user experience. That's why AltaVista went like the dodo. Period.
- l33tman 6y ago
  According to the article, altavista switched owners 3 times during the last 3 years of its life. I assume one of these had the bright idea to fill the results with crappy paid-for links. Google has these geniuses to thank for priming the playfield for them by destroying themselves.
- hakfoo 6y ago
  I recall there was a low-bandwidth, "text only" version you could use for some years afterwards which was just the search box. Probably suitable for Lynx users. Then they added one banner. I don't think the UI switchover was uniquely AltaVista-- remember this was the time when everyone wanted to be a portal and had to have a section with sports scores, repackaged news, and stock tracking. Yahoo was the last man standing on that path, but I seem to recall a lot of hay being made about the Excite/@Home stuff where the ISPs were supposed to push their portal on unsuspecting customers.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
derptron 6y ago
Now we just need an article about Geocities
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
l33tman 6y ago
I only browsed the article but had fond memories of how revolutionary AltaVista was when it launched. Suddenly you could browse the web without following links. This started a trend where you provided lesser and lesser value by stuffing links on your homepages (yes this was a thing) as people didn't need the links anymore. Some years later I remember AltaVista suddenly became full of paid links and ads, to the point of unusability. This is when Google came in, with no ads, no paid links, and actual good search results. The irony.. now Google fills at least half the first search page with paid for links and unusable results. Unfortunately, nobody (in the long run) gives away something completely for free. I would pay $1-2/month for a search portal without paid links and no sell-off of my private info.
- jaypeg25 6y ago
  Do you think $1-2 a month would really be enough? Something tells me Google makes more than $1-2 a month off me.
  - apocolyps6 6y ago
    off of serving you ads specifically? I doubt it. Bulk ad targeting data is under 30c per person. Source: https://ig.ft.com/how-much-is-your-personal-data-worth/ https://ig.ft.com/how-much-is-your-personal-data-worth/
  - chris_f 6y ago
    The estimated average Google search ad cost-per-click (CPC) is $2.69 [0]. Working on the conservative assumptions that an average person will run 10 searches a day and click on 1 search ad a day, Google will make $83.39 a month from the average user. It is likely much more though. [0] https://valveandmeter.com/pay-per-click-statistics/ https://valveandmeter.com/pay-per-click-statistics/
    - l33tman 6y ago
      Their global ad revenue is a public figure right? It should be easy to estimate an average. If they have a billion users, do they actually have $100B in monthly revenue? I highly suspect the distribution is not flat in any way though (some users are much much more valuable than others and it's why advertisers pay FB and Google to target the ads for them).
mrich 6y ago
Interesting, didn't know this was just a tech showcase. And it's always puzzling how management fails to monetize something new and successful. It seems most are only able to copy competitors.
trinix912 6y ago
Does anyone know why are both altavista's and digital's sites excluded from archive.org?
vehemenz 6y ago
The head librarian at my high school was an older lady in her early 60s, and she suggested that I use Google because it was the best search engine. Back then I used Webcrawler, but there wasn't too much distance between the competition. I thought it was weird that "googol" was spelled incorrectly and that Google's logo was ugly even by Paint Shop Pro 4 standards. It looked like search for kids. I assumed the librarian didn't know anything about computers and dismissed her advice. Within a few months everyone was using Google.
- amelius 6y ago
  > It looked like search for kids. Today, everything looks like it is made for kids. https://blog.prototypr.io/are-we-designing-for-children-an-analysis-of-infantilisation-from-a-design-perspective-b718fdf0381 https://blog.prototypr.io/are-we-designing-for-children-an-a...
  - aidenn0 6y ago
    OT, but... That article has the most misleading graph I have ever seen. It plots two items with the same units, but different origins and scale. It looks like we had a huge drop in active leisure time and it was replaced hour-for-hour by screen time (and that screen time was near zero in 2000). Instead a modest decline in the former and a slightly larger increase in the latter
  - whoopdedo 6y ago
    Google also came about around the same time as the original candy-colored iMac. It was part of the general rebellion against "boring" technology.
    - asdff 6y ago
      I really was boring when the floor, the desk, the cubicle, the walls, and the computer were all the same shade of aging beige. The sterile asylum days of technology industrial design.
  - amelius 6y ago
pdevr 6y ago
AltaVista was the first search engine I used. It was the best, because I hadn't seen anything else. Then a colleague introduced me to the early version of google.com - a minimum viable product, before that phrase became popular. Within a short period of time, without being aware of it, I almost completely stopped using AltaVista, because Google was so much better. Memories.
beezle 6y ago
When will somebody replace Google (and Bing) with one that actually works again? Is the cost of entry that high? Is there no business model to permit one to operate at some level of profit? I'm sure most here have been frustrated by the difficulty of getting "good" results on searches, even with modifiers. But what most troubles me is Google's memory/history has grown smaller and smaller, as if it has Alzheimers - searches that used to return results now bring back none.
- Dumblydorr 6y ago
  Too many sponsored links, and too much personalization. What happened to displaying the best information at the top in an easily scanned fashion? Maybe there would be more search engines in a less anti-competitive market... monopolies are hard to tackle.
- toast0 6y ago
  The cost of entry is pretty high. The web corpus is huge, which leads to follow on problems: it's expensive to fetch it, and to proccess it, and to host the resulting indexes. Fetching is tricky also because you're likely to get blocked from sites it you're too aggressive. To justify all that expense, you need a lot of users, but it will be hard to get those users because there is 20 years of 'search = google' to compete with. Yahoo search user testing from 10+ years ago found that users would prefer search results displayed with Google branding over search results with Yahoo branding, regardless of the search results. Maybe it wouldn't be so bad if it's Google vs a new hip name, but you have to somehow cultivate that hipness. Bing doesn't have it, Amazon tried doing websearch and quit pretty quick (but maybe it's used for Alexa?). You'd realistically need to build out an advertising platform too. Using Google's ad platform while trying to compete with their core market seems like a bad idea. Using Microsoft's ad platform is probably not going to a good experience, but maybe you can start with it.
  - zuppy 6y ago
    there’s another big problem that I read about a few days ago: many sites are blocking all crawlers that are not google through robots.txt file.
CapitalistCartr 6y ago
I loved Altavista. The thinking had to be done by the user, but uf you understood the process, it was a precise and accurate tool. Before it got sold around, of course. I'd construct searches along the lines of: (Word OR Word) AND (Word NEAR Word) And get great results. Of course, the Web is way to big and Javascript-y for that now.
wiremine 6y ago
It's hard to explain just how good Google was back in the day, compared to those early search engines. I distinctly remember someone suggesting it to me at our CS lab in college. A few of us had never heard of it, and we all started to do some searches to try it out. There was silence for about 5 minutes, and then someone said "this is really good." Say what you want about what Google has turned into, but it was an incredibly important tool that came around at the right time. Also, it makes me really happy that they've kept the "I'm Feeling Lucky" button around.
- peterlk 6y ago
  I wonder if the "I'm feeling lucky" has stayed around because it's a good training heuristic for Google Home (and maybe other services?) even if very few people actually use it. I'm genuinely curious why they've kept it around.
  - flycaliguy 6y ago
    My guess would be it’s more of a branding exercise. Quirky, colourful, friendly.
    - saalweachter 6y ago
      It's also pretty ideal feature to keep around even if it is mostly unused. 1) It isn't very complicated -- it doesn't require a lot of code that is going to rot. 2) When it is used, it's cheaper rather than more expensive. 3) It only "clutters" a UI that isn't actually seen that often nowadays -- you have to actually go to google.com, rather than just typing in the browser bar -- and isn't particularly cluttered.
      - Google234 6y ago
        However, if it makes the experience worse then it’s not worth keeping. I’m sure they did some study where they found that most users weren’t happy and had to go back.
- 6y ago
corty 6y ago
From the same era, I still remember Excite Extreme: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aw9x5us4ZM4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aw9x5us4ZM4 Not useful, except for the bling factor. 3D VR search in 1998!
Dumblydorr 6y ago
Is there a search engine which displays 4-6 thumbnails of top sites? I feel google results are just giant walls of text that you randomly pick one. If you could actually see the relevant text on the website, you'd not even have to click?
WalterGR 6y ago
I very distinctly remember when AltaVista removed support for "quoted words and phrases" in queries. I was studying CS in college at the time. I think that's when we switched en masse to Google.
pelle 6y ago
I was the first corporate web master for AltaVista and joined in January 1996 to manage everything except for the actual search engine itself. It was my first real job at a large company and taught me a lot about working in corporate America. I saw so many mistakes made within the year I worked there that were obvious even at the time for a lot of us that worked there, but at the same time there are many similarities to what happens with other very well funded projects trying to make sense of a new technology and way of doing businesses within a large very important company with a very different business model. I have seen virtually the exact same playbook happen in the enterprise blockchain space in multiple occasions over the last 5 years. It is sad in many ways to see what happened to DEC (probably more so than AltaVista). It was such an innovative company back in the 60s and 70s, but unlike IBM weren't able to reinvent themselves in first the new 80s world of PCs and then later internet. Classic case of innovators dilemma. AltaVista itself largely died, because in a misguided attempt to manage the innovators dilemma they just tried to rebrand everything network oriented they had as AltaVista. People only remember the search engine now and for good reason. But we had AltaVista firewalls, gigabit routers, network cards, mail server (both SMTP and X400 (!!!) and a bunch of other junk without a coherent strategy. Everything that had anything to do with networking got the AltaVista logo on it. The focus became on selling their existing junk using the now hip AltaVista brand, but the AltaVista search itself was not given priority. I learnt a lot from my experience there, grew to be extremely skeptical, learnt to love Dilbert and also learnt how cool the DEC Hardware and Digital Unix was compared to the Sun Sparc and Solaris stuff I had to work on afterwards.
- Crashprofessor 6y ago
  I was in Nassau working between FSG/PM and the ACA/CORBA team. Recall many trips to the WRL, they always had the coolest stuff; network tunnels and firefly. Back then who you hated said a great deal and I recall several other CEs playing the silver bullet game to perfection. I'm curious the relation to the corporate blockchain?
  - at-fates-hands 6y ago
    >> I'm curious the relation to the corporate blockchain? I think its the idea of companies seeing new tech and trying to leverage it somehow in their own businesses and failing - badly. Here's my own anecdotal evidence with blockchain: I work in a very large health care company. For about four months, there was a huge buzz around the company about how to leverage block chain in health care. The main idea was using block chain to manage patient accounts and PPE. We had all the execs bring in to do huge presentations. They brought in people from IBM to talk about Hyperledger and other block chain companies. They posted videos and articles about how this going to transform healthcare, we were all told this was going to be huge. They told people they were going to form a new team, hire developers and this was a going to be a huge focus in 2020. Six months later? You couldn't find a single resource on any of it on any of the internal company sites. All the presentations stopped, the execs stopped talking about block chain seemingly over night and it was like poof! the idea of block chain, or any mention of it or the "revolution" that supposed to follow? Completely disappeared into the abyss, never to be heard from again. I have no idea how much they sank into the notion that block chain could be used for health care, or how many people they hired or the contracts they signed with IBM, but I can only assume they lost a lot of money before they finally realized it wasn't going to work out.
pg_bot 6y ago
I still remember when I was first introduced to google in the 5th grade. Our computer class taught us about search engines and how to find information online. They showed us lycos, altavista, dogpile, ask jeeves, etc. and everyone in the class had their favorite site they would use when working on projects. Within a day of showing us google, every kid in the class used google exclusively. They were so much better than their competition at the time.
at_a_remove 6y ago
I miss the NEAR keyword. I gather that Google has AROUND(n), or did at some point (one never knows with them), but damn, NEAR was pretty helpful when you had a nicely constructed Boolean that wasn't quite getting you what you needed.
gandalfian 6y ago
After the dot com crash? many of the spiders just stopped indexing new content. The altavista index became way out of date. If you weren't already in a yahoo category you weren't getting in. Dmoz didn't even have the editors to appoint any new editors... It was less a failure than a mass giving up, as if everyone had gone but forgotten to turn the servers off when they left.
uniqueid 6y ago
Google Search today is repeating the same mistakes I remember from the late 90s. For the first decade of the web, there were a handful of search engines competing, rising and falling in popularity. The best were altavista, and fast. One thing that was noticeable back then was that bad search engines (and search engines that 'jumped the shark' and became bad) generally did so in similar ways: a) they included paid results, or devoted too much real-estate to advertising b) when they failed to find results, they tried to trick the user by showing related results (eg: omitting or substituting terms) c) they avoided 'logical and' for search terms, in favor of 'logical or', making it difficult for users to search with precision. The people at Google surely believe their recent changes have nothing to do with all that. Far as I'm concerned, aside from the extra millions of dollars they've spent on AI research, it's the same old story. Nobody needs a somewhat smarter version of AskJeeves.
- freedomben 6y ago
  I mostly agreed with you until: > Nobody needs a somewhat smarter version of AskJeeves. That's exactly what I need. It's not right for everything, but asking questions is the natural form of information seeking for a human. Being able to do that well is a huge value add.
  - uniqueid 6y ago
    Yes. I didn't want to be nuanced there, though, because the nuanced version is: nobody wants the kind of 'smarter AskJeeves' that technology is currently capable of producing. Had I written that, the next thing you know, someone would be calling me an idiot and informing me about the wonders of GPT3 and Tesla autopilot :)
    - freedomben 6y ago
      Heh, good point :-) Yeah the current state of the tech is (in my opinion) just a voice command line. You have to know the right keywords to say, and in the right order, to get it to do what you want. It's largely an exercise in guess, test, and revise.
kazinator 6y ago
When I tried the Google search engine in 1998 for the first time, I dropped AltaVista like a hot potato and never looked back. Any subsequent AltaVista history is pretty much an irrelevant "all over but the shouting".
guytv 6y ago
1) Google was the only search engine at that time that understood the power of search. Yahoo pushed its search box below the fold. Lycos, AV tried to bring more "content" to the search page. 2) It was blazingly fast. 3) It allowed you to test your current search with the competition search engines. After a few times you did that, you realized they were by far the best, and did not try it anymore.
- papito 6y ago
  In the time of dial-up, having a fast-loading search page probably accelerated the transition. Users factor in speed of load into their preference, even though they are not aware of it. Old school search engine home pages were criminally crowded. Google provided frictionless experience.
rsync 6y ago
s/first/only FTFY.
jkmcf 6y ago
I owe most of my career to AltaVista after comp.lang., comp.unix., and comp.databases.* -- even more so because AltaVista had indexed Internet newsgroups.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
Spearchucker 6y ago
I think the first search engine I used was Magellan. Until AltaVista happened. Loved AltaVista, until Hotbot/Inktomi, which was the only one I had trouble letting go of, I think only because of their really clean and minimal UI. Even when Google came along I was one of the few that had a finite number of web sites I used to use that made Google virtually useless to me. The only search engine I use now is DDG. It was as insane marginalising Google back then as so many other tech fads since then, including IOT, Bitcoin, XP/agile, Netbooks, 3D TVs (remember those?), and so on. There is an upside to not having used anything Google - to this day I have zero reliance on any single product of theirs.
jimpick 6y ago
I joined a set-top box startup in 2002 based in Palo Alto (Digeo) that ran out of the former Altavista offices - same building as PAIX. https://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2009/02/11/paix-a-key-hub-from-alta-vista-to-facebook https://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2009/02/11/paix... I ran a build cluster in the server room in the basement where Altavista used to be located. The server room was actually pretty small - just a few rows of racks. We still had a sign in our office that said "Altavista Operations". It's pretty mindblowing just thinking how small internet-scale things were back then compared to now.
jve 6y ago
Ahh, that day when I was introduced with the search engine & internet, they took us some kids to library PCs. The librarian instructed us to open altavista and said: If you want to find Mr. Bean and will search for "Bean", you will find... beans. Type "Mr. Bean". Only years later someone told me about google.
mech422 6y ago
I still miss AltaVista's query language. So much better at narrowing stuff down to _exactly_ want you wanted then google is, even today. Between googles "let me guess what you want and ignore search terms" and their paid placements, page 1 of the SERP is useless for technical work. Doubly so if your researching something obscure...
wintorez 6y ago
The first good search engine was metacrawler.
dbsmith83 6y ago
I remember AltaVista even had a free dialup service. IIRC, it was like netzero, in that it displayed ads in a window that stayed on top. Of course, I would just find the window handle and set it to invisible
TylerE 6y ago
This line from the Wiki jumped out at me: > As of 1998, it used 20 multi-processor machines using DEC's 64-bit Alpha processor. Together, the back-end machines had 130 GB of RAM and 500 GB of hard disk drive space, I'm typing this on a machine with 20 threads, 64GB of RAM, and a hair over 12TB of disk.

349 points by chris_f 6y ago

Am I the only one who thinks this article is very poorly written? It doesn't really tell all the strategic reasons why Altavista fell into oblivion and its structure is all over the place. I also love Paul Graham's framework for imagining the future and working backwards. If we think like that, Google is nowhere near the form of a final solution to information retrieval. An ideal state would be to retrieve information correct the first time with everything you need bundled into the page. If that problem is solved, then you have to tackle the question of why the user was asking the query in the first place, and how your product can help people have a solution to their answer so that the query is never repeated!

decasteve 6y ago

What drew me to AltaVista was that it gave me results that didn't exist elsewhere. It took some boolean gymnastics to get precise results, or going a few pages deep, but stuff, if it existed, was findable. I almost wish there were less precise and more obscure options out there today. A search engine that purposefully didn't index mainstream news, social media, nor shopping/product sites.

rangersanger 6y ago
I would happily pay $5 a month For an ad free search engine that didn’t index Pinterest.
- kordlessagain 6y ago
  Working on it.
  - slater 6y ago
    Oh?
- jeffbee 6y ago
  Honestly wouldn’t it be against EU antitrust policy to explicitly do this?
  - dotancohen 6y ago
    It would work if instead of deindexing Pintrest specifically, the end user could enter a list of sites that they wish to never see results for.
- dotancohen 6y ago
  I'm with you on this. I would pay far less, $1/month would be the point where I would begin considering it. There are just too many "only $5" services and they would add up quickly if I were to allow myself that amount of money. The problem with this model, though, is support. A service with 100 million untrained end users each paying a dollar will need to provide quality customer service to 100 million untrained end users. It is much easier to sell ads to 10,000 "affiliates" who feel that they have some special arrangement and thus accept some responsibility of their own, and make $10,000 off each of those.
  - true_religion 6y ago
    I agree there are too many $5 services, but a search engine is something that I use every waking hour of my day. I get so much use from it, that $5 per month is a bargin. I would definitely pay Google just to be able to remove some sites permanently from my results. They're just spam to me, even if Google thinks they are legitimate.
  - freedomben 6y ago
    Yes, exactly right. If people are paying any amount at all they expect it to work and work perfectly. I'm not saying that's unreasonable, but it does quickly become unfeasible at scale with users who have no training at all. Then on top of that the skimming the payment processors do makes a large percentage of that $1/month go to transaction fees. Charging yearly helps with that but many people won't want to do that.
  - Closi 6y ago
    Facebook makes $50 per user per year, so I would assume $1 per month is an order of magnitude less than what google is making from you at the moment. $10 per month is probably more realistic.
- enriquto 6y ago
  I'd love an option to setup domains where no search results are to be returned. Of course pinterest, but also quora, (and sometimes reddit), etc.
  - pault 6y ago
    -site:Pinterest.com
    - mishac 6y ago
      That doesn't work well for me because I get still get pinterest.co.uk, pinterest.ca, pitnerest.it etc etc. I guess we need wildcard domain exlclusion.
      - LordNight 6y ago
        The correct command is -inurl:pinterest. Additionally, for those, who likes to add reddit in the search query, i'd also like to recommend " inurl:forum OR inurl:board " (note also that forum and forums gives different results for some reason). Personally, I like to do broad searches on google to discover new stuff, but for the past 7 or 8 years, google often returns ~100 result instead of the usual 1000000+. And, contrary to the logic, adding various inurl: commands actualy gives you more results instead of limiting them and thus significantly improves searching capabilities.
- dalbasal 6y ago
  I think this can be generalised as "more power to users." You might want to filter Pinterest. OP wants to avoid mainstream news, social media, nor shopping/product sites. This requires users to be involved. Filters, refinement, user preferences. etc etc. Search is a powerful tool, and the power has been growing exponentially since 1995. But, almost all of that power is channeled into instant results, intuitiveness, "sane defaults" and such. All the capabilities are in the background and the assumed user is lowest denominator on all fronts. The low effort, low technical capabilities, low understanding, etc. This is most people (me included) most of the time, but not all of the time. Maybe I want to filter seo spam (like pinterest) more aggressively. Etc. This isn't a slam on google really. One thing can't do everything and the thing google search does is what most people need most of the time. It's definitely the thing that makes the most money. But... none of a search engines power has been channeled into making search a power tool. It's a tool that everyone uses many times per day, but there is no learning curve. No getting better. You can't really invest effort and get rewarded for that effort. Pity really, all this power is there. It's right under the surface. Let us be more than the lazy, dumb user sometimes. Google have reversed the User Interface paradigm. Instead of users learning the software and telling it what to do, the software learns the user. I don't necessarily mean NNs or personalisation. I mean that the paraign is software-centric. "If the user does X, how should the software respond?" instead of "If the user user wants Y, how does she make the software do it?" That's great for intuitiveness, but it also creates a frame where the software gets better over time but the user never does.
  - visarga 6y ago
    > think this can be generalised as "more power to users." I agree, we need more power to control. There should be more than one recipe for ranking and filtering, and we should have more to say about what information is being hidden from us. Society is diverse, a single formula automatically discriminates some groups. Let people make the choice.
  - abraae 6y ago
    Yeah, I also want filters, refinement, user preferences. etc. And I want it to be social - I want to search using the same filters that Tim Bray uses. Or I want to use the filters that the people use who in aggregate tend to click through to the same results pages that I visit. So much amazing stuff could be done, but here we are controlled by algorithms that treat us all as brain dead sheep who only want to know about what the Kardashians are up to. I suspect that Google knows about these desires, but would prefer the world where everyone is a sheep.
- disown 6y ago
  or you could just add "-pinterest" to your search query and save yourself $5.
- layer8 6y ago
  I’m using a search shortcut that just adds “-pinterest” to all searches (and also activates Google verbatim search mode).
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
- ajnin 6y ago
  I'm using the following User Script to remove specific domains from Google search results. It does the job well enough for me. https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/1682-google-hit-hider-by-domain-search-filter-block-sites https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/1682-google-hit-hider-by-d...
- kome 6y ago
  google with filters for a dollar a month would be awesome, like a function to "block this domain forever"... it would clean my search results from the annoying offenders. and i would gather user inputted blocked domains data to produce better search results for non subscribing users...
- mech422 6y ago
  The really annoying part about pinterest, is I never seem to be able to get back to the original directions/plans/whatever. Its like "Hey, look at this cool stuff I won't tell you how to make, even though I swiped it from a HOWTO site"
- mech422 6y ago
  I would also pay to have google freaking remember my search preferences. You've got my dang account - pull the prefs. from it.
tams 6y ago
Not exactly the same approach that you describe, but Million Short allows you to exclude the most popular websites from your search results. https://millionshort.com/ https://millionshort.com/
_Microft 6y ago
I wish there were still a search engine that followed my query strings and operators to the letter instead of attempting to be extra clever. Even Bing seems to be doing that no longer.
- sshagent 6y ago
  oh god yes, that would be nice. I know what i typed stupid search engine, if i put it in quotes...i only want that exact phrase. Don't just cast that aside and search for the words individually.
- chris_f 6y ago
  We will respect your search query at Runnaroo if you use quotes. Google also has a verbatim search filter, which does a decent job most of the time.
  - dheera 6y ago
    ... until you want to search for something verbatim with quotes in it. Google doesn't seem to respect escaped quotes like "hello \"this\" is a test" which is quite surprising to me considering how they invent programming languages and all.
    - jeffbee 6y ago
      I imagine this is because the punctuation isn’t in their index at all, so it makes no difference how you format the query.
      - derefr 6y ago
        Is there an whole-Web search engine that isn’t a fulltext search engine, but rather works more like grepping a virtual text file that contains the entire Internet, such that one could match on punctuation and so forth?
        jeffbee 6y ago
foobarian 6y ago
Same, at one point the size of AltaVista's index was vastly above all the competition and was the best place to go for finding obscure stuff. With the boolean filters it was possible to exhaustively search the web. Unfortunately that didn't scale with the size of the web; at one point the amount of pages got large enough that doing a smart ranking like Google did became more effective than the "look at all pages of results" usage required for AltaVista. It felt like a monumental transition, like when a program gets too big for main memory and causes the computer to start swapping to disk.
dalbasal 6y ago
>>if it existed, was findable This is really the precedent that mattered, I think. Remember one line of a poem? You can probably find the rest. Recall a Douglas Adams piece about rice farming in Bali or Java or something... you can find it. As you say, it took boolean gymnastics. But, that really just means modifying your search terms and scrolling through some results. Being less powerful than 2020 google kind of put more power/responsibility in users' hands. A user needed to use a search engine like a tool. I want what you want too... Everything google (mail/search/youtube, etc)... but designed for more user effort. Finding the best-for-most result instantly is great, but sometimes you want the tool to help you find a result on page 112 within a few minutes. Bring back a little bit of a directory feel even. Let me narrow down, refine and shape results gradually. Assume that I will rummage through a bunch of crap to find what I want.
Terretta 6y ago
Yes... Enjoyed AltaVista and FAST (AllTheWeb)[1] for precision searching. That reminded me of Architext, and EWS (Excite for Web Servers)[2], but a good bit of Googling (ahem) later, seems difficult to find much about most of the mid to late 90s standalone local search engines any more, except perhaps Inktomi. Most are not mentioned in Wikipedia search engine timeline[3]. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Development_Center_Norway https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Development_Center_N... 2. https://www.wired.com/1998/01/excite-moves-to-patch-search-software/ https://www.wired.com/1998/01/excite-moves-to-patch-search-s... 3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_web_search_engines https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_web_search_engines EDIT: Using the search engine Qwant, I was able to find an original EWS (Excite for Web Servers) help page: http://www1.udel.edu/Excite/AT-helpdoc.html http://www1.udel.edu/Excite/AT-helpdoc.html At the time, it was amazingly out of the box: Excite for Web Servers makes it easy for you to add searching -- Excite, Inc.'s advanced concept-based searching -- to your Web site. Excite for Web Servers provides a simple Web-browser interface for doing all the things necessary to enable concept-based searching of collections of documents -- administering, indexing, and searching over the collections. In particular, one can: - define a document collection -- that is, specify a set of documents to be considered a single collection over which one can search, - design customized pages for displaying to users who wish to search over that collection, - index that collection, monitoring the progress, and search the collection. With Excite for Web Servers, it's easy to set up concept-based-searchable Web sites in minutes.
kevin_thibedeau 6y ago
The "near" operator was particularly useful.

SubGenius 6y ago

Unrelated, but does anybody remember a site called astalavista.com? It had a lot of script kiddie tools, among them sub7, msn messenger flooders etc. I miss the early internet.

GekkePrutser 6y ago
Oh yes I remember it! It was a great place for software serial numbers too.
404mm 6y ago
It was astalavista.box.sk
- FartyMcFarter 6y ago
  It's on archive.org . Here's a randomly chosen snapshot from 2001: https://web.archive.org/web/20010119175000/http://astalavista.box.sk/ https://web.archive.org/web/20010119175000/http://astalavist...
slater 6y ago
came here to check for astalavista mention :D
unclekev 6y ago
I remember paying for a membership for their "Premium Security Portal" back in 1999/2000. Got in a lot of trouble at school because of the things I learnt on that site. Good times :)

GekkePrutser 6y ago

Yeah it's a shame. Digital could have been the Google. Probably a much better one (it can't get much worse than Google's privacy invasion, after all).

olentangy 6y ago
Coulda, woulda, shoulda. I remember when I left DEC for Apple in the mid-80's and my manager told me I was making a mistake going to work for a company making toy computers. DEC was a true leader during the mini-computer era, but after that nope. Happens to a lot of companies.
- GekkePrutser 6y ago
  True, they really neglected AltaVista. That was a colossal mistake. They really got stuck in their old mindset.

dalbasal 6y ago

Being a predecessor is not a failure. Au contraire. One of Dawkins' memorable lines is "Descendents are common. Ancestors are exceptionally rare" You could say crocodilians succeeded and dinosaurs failed. A croc is still a croc, but the dinosaurs are hummingbirds and seagulls. If you think about it though, both are ancestors... an exceptional success. Altavista is a Khan.

KineticLensman 6y ago
> A croc is still a croc, but the dinosaurs are hummingbirds and seagulls. Slightly off-topic, but I went to Wikipedia to remind myself of the specific category of dinosaur that birds are descended from, and the 'Today's featured article' was about Achelousaurus, a ceratopsid dinosaur! I think this is the first time I've had such a close match to the thing I was interested in. From there, it was just three clicks to the article I needed [0], which, incidentally, stated that "The present scientific consensus is that birds are a group of maniraptoran theropod dinosaurs that originated during the Mesozoic Era". [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Origin_of_birds https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Origin_of_birds

liveoneggs 6y ago

altavista starting serving pop-up and pop-under ads. Google, at the time I switched, was serving tiny text-only ads. Both had good results.

404mm 6y ago

* don’t confuse with astalavista ;)

m3kw9 6y ago

The results were crap and it was slow that’s what killed it. While other alternatives were getting better

orev 6y ago
That’s a bit harsh. It was the best thing available at the time, and it held its place for a while, until Google came along. Progress is always about moving from one thing to the next.
laurent92 6y ago
Results were crap because pages started doing SEO by stuffing white keywords on white background. If it were relaunched today, it may be efficient. But the whole game is to stay on top of this. DDG provides almost the Google results, yet it feels much less efficient. I think, for the single-box-with-single-keyword-search market, Google is the best we can do, but there might still be room for other search engines. Also, if you need historical, political or medical information, that is 3 domains where Google is already out of the game. There is a lot of room today for a search engine which would only returns technical results and not politically or racially motivated results like Google does (Google had project to promote races other than Whites, and thus, started not returning some results depending on the race of the scientist).
- iagovar 6y ago
  > Also, if you need historical, political or medical information, that is 3 domains where Google is already out of the game. I find myself using every non-google search engine in this areas. I'm pretty lazy about search engines but it bothered me enough.

chris_f 6y ago

At the time, HotBot was my other go-to search engine. Interesting to see that it is still around, but is now a VPN company.

petepete 6y ago
I was a loyal mamma.com user until Google came along. I always liked the quality of results and the UI. They were swallowed up by Copernic who appear to still exist in the desktop search space.
guytv 6y ago
... It's not the same company. The "HotBot" name and domain were sold for $155k in 2016 to an unnamed buyer[0] 0 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HotBot https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HotBot

RoutinePlayer 6y ago

I remember having AltaVista as my primary bookmark, until they accelerated the ads and monetization, and render it almost completely useless. It was so obvious they wanted to make quick, obscene money from of it. They cared very little about the negative impact that had on user experience. That's why AltaVista went like the dodo. Period.

l33tman 6y ago
According to the article, altavista switched owners 3 times during the last 3 years of its life. I assume one of these had the bright idea to fill the results with crappy paid-for links. Google has these geniuses to thank for priming the playfield for them by destroying themselves.
hakfoo 6y ago
I recall there was a low-bandwidth, "text only" version you could use for some years afterwards which was just the search box. Probably suitable for Lynx users. Then they added one banner. I don't think the UI switchover was uniquely AltaVista-- remember this was the time when everyone wanted to be a portal and had to have a section with sports scores, repackaged news, and stock tracking. Yahoo was the last man standing on that path, but I seem to recall a lot of hay being made about the Excite/@Home stuff where the ISPs were supposed to push their portal on unsuspecting customers.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

derptron 6y ago

Now we just need an article about Geocities

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

l33tman 6y ago

I only browsed the article but had fond memories of how revolutionary AltaVista was when it launched. Suddenly you could browse the web without following links. This started a trend where you provided lesser and lesser value by stuffing links on your homepages (yes this was a thing) as people didn't need the links anymore. Some years later I remember AltaVista suddenly became full of paid links and ads, to the point of unusability. This is when Google came in, with no ads, no paid links, and actual good search results. The irony.. now Google fills at least half the first search page with paid for links and unusable results. Unfortunately, nobody (in the long run) gives away something completely for free. I would pay $1-2/month for a search portal without paid links and no sell-off of my private info.

jaypeg25 6y ago
Do you think $1-2 a month would really be enough? Something tells me Google makes more than $1-2 a month off me.
- apocolyps6 6y ago
  off of serving you ads specifically? I doubt it. Bulk ad targeting data is under 30c per person. Source: https://ig.ft.com/how-much-is-your-personal-data-worth/ https://ig.ft.com/how-much-is-your-personal-data-worth/
- chris_f 6y ago
  The estimated average Google search ad cost-per-click (CPC) is $2.69 [0]. Working on the conservative assumptions that an average person will run 10 searches a day and click on 1 search ad a day, Google will make $83.39 a month from the average user. It is likely much more though. [0] https://valveandmeter.com/pay-per-click-statistics/ https://valveandmeter.com/pay-per-click-statistics/
  - l33tman 6y ago
    Their global ad revenue is a public figure right? It should be easy to estimate an average. If they have a billion users, do they actually have $100B in monthly revenue? I highly suspect the distribution is not flat in any way though (some users are much much more valuable than others and it's why advertisers pay FB and Google to target the ads for them).

mrich 6y ago

Interesting, didn't know this was just a tech showcase. And it's always puzzling how management fails to monetize something new and successful. It seems most are only able to copy competitors.

trinix912 6y ago

Does anyone know why are both altavista's and digital's sites excluded from archive.org?

vehemenz 6y ago

The head librarian at my high school was an older lady in her early 60s, and she suggested that I use Google because it was the best search engine. Back then I used Webcrawler, but there wasn't too much distance between the competition. I thought it was weird that "googol" was spelled incorrectly and that Google's logo was ugly even by Paint Shop Pro 4 standards. It looked like search for kids. I assumed the librarian didn't know anything about computers and dismissed her advice. Within a few months everyone was using Google.

amelius 6y ago
> It looked like search for kids. Today, everything looks like it is made for kids. https://blog.prototypr.io/are-we-designing-for-children-an-analysis-of-infantilisation-from-a-design-perspective-b718fdf0381 https://blog.prototypr.io/are-we-designing-for-children-an-a...
- aidenn0 6y ago
  OT, but... That article has the most misleading graph I have ever seen. It plots two items with the same units, but different origins and scale. It looks like we had a huge drop in active leisure time and it was replaced hour-for-hour by screen time (and that screen time was near zero in 2000). Instead a modest decline in the former and a slightly larger increase in the latter
- whoopdedo 6y ago
  Google also came about around the same time as the original candy-colored iMac. It was part of the general rebellion against "boring" technology.
  - asdff 6y ago
    I really was boring when the floor, the desk, the cubicle, the walls, and the computer were all the same shade of aging beige. The sterile asylum days of technology industrial design.
- amelius 6y ago

pdevr 6y ago

AltaVista was the first search engine I used. It was the best, because I hadn't seen anything else. Then a colleague introduced me to the early version of google.com - a minimum viable product, before that phrase became popular. Within a short period of time, without being aware of it, I almost completely stopped using AltaVista, because Google was so much better. Memories.

beezle 6y ago

When will somebody replace Google (and Bing) with one that actually works again? Is the cost of entry that high? Is there no business model to permit one to operate at some level of profit? I'm sure most here have been frustrated by the difficulty of getting "good" results on searches, even with modifiers. But what most troubles me is Google's memory/history has grown smaller and smaller, as if it has Alzheimers - searches that used to return results now bring back none.

Dumblydorr 6y ago
Too many sponsored links, and too much personalization. What happened to displaying the best information at the top in an easily scanned fashion? Maybe there would be more search engines in a less anti-competitive market... monopolies are hard to tackle.
toast0 6y ago
The cost of entry is pretty high. The web corpus is huge, which leads to follow on problems: it's expensive to fetch it, and to proccess it, and to host the resulting indexes. Fetching is tricky also because you're likely to get blocked from sites it you're too aggressive. To justify all that expense, you need a lot of users, but it will be hard to get those users because there is 20 years of 'search = google' to compete with. Yahoo search user testing from 10+ years ago found that users would prefer search results displayed with Google branding over search results with Yahoo branding, regardless of the search results. Maybe it wouldn't be so bad if it's Google vs a new hip name, but you have to somehow cultivate that hipness. Bing doesn't have it, Amazon tried doing websearch and quit pretty quick (but maybe it's used for Alexa?). You'd realistically need to build out an advertising platform too. Using Google's ad platform while trying to compete with their core market seems like a bad idea. Using Microsoft's ad platform is probably not going to a good experience, but maybe you can start with it.
- zuppy 6y ago
  there’s another big problem that I read about a few days ago: many sites are blocking all crawlers that are not google through robots.txt file.

CapitalistCartr 6y ago

I loved Altavista. The thinking had to be done by the user, but uf you understood the process, it was a precise and accurate tool. Before it got sold around, of course. I'd construct searches along the lines of: (Word OR Word) AND (Word NEAR Word) And get great results. Of course, the Web is way to big and Javascript-y for that now.

wiremine 6y ago

It's hard to explain just how good Google was back in the day, compared to those early search engines. I distinctly remember someone suggesting it to me at our CS lab in college. A few of us had never heard of it, and we all started to do some searches to try it out. There was silence for about 5 minutes, and then someone said "this is really good." Say what you want about what Google has turned into, but it was an incredibly important tool that came around at the right time. Also, it makes me really happy that they've kept the "I'm Feeling Lucky" button around.

peterlk 6y ago
I wonder if the "I'm feeling lucky" has stayed around because it's a good training heuristic for Google Home (and maybe other services?) even if very few people actually use it. I'm genuinely curious why they've kept it around.
- flycaliguy 6y ago
  My guess would be it’s more of a branding exercise. Quirky, colourful, friendly.
  - saalweachter 6y ago
    It's also pretty ideal feature to keep around even if it is mostly unused. 1) It isn't very complicated -- it doesn't require a lot of code that is going to rot. 2) When it is used, it's cheaper rather than more expensive. 3) It only "clutters" a UI that isn't actually seen that often nowadays -- you have to actually go to google.com, rather than just typing in the browser bar -- and isn't particularly cluttered.
    - Google234 6y ago
      However, if it makes the experience worse then it’s not worth keeping. I’m sure they did some study where they found that most users weren’t happy and had to go back.
6y ago

corty 6y ago

From the same era, I still remember Excite Extreme: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aw9x5us4ZM4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aw9x5us4ZM4 Not useful, except for the bling factor. 3D VR search in 1998!

Dumblydorr 6y ago

Is there a search engine which displays 4-6 thumbnails of top sites? I feel google results are just giant walls of text that you randomly pick one. If you could actually see the relevant text on the website, you'd not even have to click?

WalterGR 6y ago

I very distinctly remember when AltaVista removed support for "quoted words and phrases" in queries. I was studying CS in college at the time. I think that's when we switched en masse to Google.

pelle 6y ago

I was the first corporate web master for AltaVista and joined in January 1996 to manage everything except for the actual search engine itself. It was my first real job at a large company and taught me a lot about working in corporate America. I saw so many mistakes made within the year I worked there that were obvious even at the time for a lot of us that worked there, but at the same time there are many similarities to what happens with other very well funded projects trying to make sense of a new technology and way of doing businesses within a large very important company with a very different business model. I have seen virtually the exact same playbook happen in the enterprise blockchain space in multiple occasions over the last 5 years. It is sad in many ways to see what happened to DEC (probably more so than AltaVista). It was such an innovative company back in the 60s and 70s, but unlike IBM weren't able to reinvent themselves in first the new 80s world of PCs and then later internet. Classic case of innovators dilemma. AltaVista itself largely died, because in a misguided attempt to manage the innovators dilemma they just tried to rebrand everything network oriented they had as AltaVista. People only remember the search engine now and for good reason. But we had AltaVista firewalls, gigabit routers, network cards, mail server (both SMTP and X400 (!!!) and a bunch of other junk without a coherent strategy. Everything that had anything to do with networking got the AltaVista logo on it. The focus became on selling their existing junk using the now hip AltaVista brand, but the AltaVista search itself was not given priority. I learnt a lot from my experience there, grew to be extremely skeptical, learnt to love Dilbert and also learnt how cool the DEC Hardware and Digital Unix was compared to the Sun Sparc and Solaris stuff I had to work on afterwards.

Crashprofessor 6y ago
I was in Nassau working between FSG/PM and the ACA/CORBA team. Recall many trips to the WRL, they always had the coolest stuff; network tunnels and firefly. Back then who you hated said a great deal and I recall several other CEs playing the silver bullet game to perfection. I'm curious the relation to the corporate blockchain?
- at-fates-hands 6y ago
  >> I'm curious the relation to the corporate blockchain? I think its the idea of companies seeing new tech and trying to leverage it somehow in their own businesses and failing - badly. Here's my own anecdotal evidence with blockchain: I work in a very large health care company. For about four months, there was a huge buzz around the company about how to leverage block chain in health care. The main idea was using block chain to manage patient accounts and PPE. We had all the execs bring in to do huge presentations. They brought in people from IBM to talk about Hyperledger and other block chain companies. They posted videos and articles about how this going to transform healthcare, we were all told this was going to be huge. They told people they were going to form a new team, hire developers and this was a going to be a huge focus in 2020. Six months later? You couldn't find a single resource on any of it on any of the internal company sites. All the presentations stopped, the execs stopped talking about block chain seemingly over night and it was like poof! the idea of block chain, or any mention of it or the "revolution" that supposed to follow? Completely disappeared into the abyss, never to be heard from again. I have no idea how much they sank into the notion that block chain could be used for health care, or how many people they hired or the contracts they signed with IBM, but I can only assume they lost a lot of money before they finally realized it wasn't going to work out.

pg_bot 6y ago

I still remember when I was first introduced to google in the 5th grade. Our computer class taught us about search engines and how to find information online. They showed us lycos, altavista, dogpile, ask jeeves, etc. and everyone in the class had their favorite site they would use when working on projects. Within a day of showing us google, every kid in the class used google exclusively. They were so much better than their competition at the time.

at_a_remove 6y ago

I miss the NEAR keyword. I gather that Google has AROUND(n), or did at some point (one never knows with them), but damn, NEAR was pretty helpful when you had a nicely constructed Boolean that wasn't quite getting you what you needed.

gandalfian 6y ago

After the dot com crash? many of the spiders just stopped indexing new content. The altavista index became way out of date. If you weren't already in a yahoo category you weren't getting in. Dmoz didn't even have the editors to appoint any new editors... It was less a failure than a mass giving up, as if everyone had gone but forgotten to turn the servers off when they left.

uniqueid 6y ago

Google Search today is repeating the same mistakes I remember from the late 90s. For the first decade of the web, there were a handful of search engines competing, rising and falling in popularity. The best were altavista, and fast. One thing that was noticeable back then was that bad search engines (and search engines that 'jumped the shark' and became bad) generally did so in similar ways: a) they included paid results, or devoted too much real-estate to advertising b) when they failed to find results, they tried to trick the user by showing related results (eg: omitting or substituting terms) c) they avoided 'logical and' for search terms, in favor of 'logical or', making it difficult for users to search with precision. The people at Google surely believe their recent changes have nothing to do with all that. Far as I'm concerned, aside from the extra millions of dollars they've spent on AI research, it's the same old story. Nobody needs a somewhat smarter version of AskJeeves.

freedomben 6y ago
I mostly agreed with you until: > Nobody needs a somewhat smarter version of AskJeeves. That's exactly what I need. It's not right for everything, but asking questions is the natural form of information seeking for a human. Being able to do that well is a huge value add.
- uniqueid 6y ago
  Yes. I didn't want to be nuanced there, though, because the nuanced version is: nobody wants the kind of 'smarter AskJeeves' that technology is currently capable of producing. Had I written that, the next thing you know, someone would be calling me an idiot and informing me about the wonders of GPT3 and Tesla autopilot :)
  - freedomben 6y ago
    Heh, good point :-) Yeah the current state of the tech is (in my opinion) just a voice command line. You have to know the right keywords to say, and in the right order, to get it to do what you want. It's largely an exercise in guess, test, and revise.

kazinator 6y ago

When I tried the Google search engine in 1998 for the first time, I dropped AltaVista like a hot potato and never looked back. Any subsequent AltaVista history is pretty much an irrelevant "all over but the shouting".

guytv 6y ago

1) Google was the only search engine at that time that understood the power of search. Yahoo pushed its search box below the fold. Lycos, AV tried to bring more "content" to the search page. 2) It was blazingly fast. 3) It allowed you to test your current search with the competition search engines. After a few times you did that, you realized they were by far the best, and did not try it anymore.

papito 6y ago
In the time of dial-up, having a fast-loading search page probably accelerated the transition. Users factor in speed of load into their preference, even though they are not aware of it. Old school search engine home pages were criminally crowded. Google provided frictionless experience.

rsync 6y ago

s/first/only FTFY.

jkmcf 6y ago

I owe most of my career to AltaVista after comp.lang., comp.unix., and comp.databases.* -- even more so because AltaVista had indexed Internet newsgroups.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

Spearchucker 6y ago

I think the first search engine I used was Magellan. Until AltaVista happened. Loved AltaVista, until Hotbot/Inktomi, which was the only one I had trouble letting go of, I think only because of their really clean and minimal UI. Even when Google came along I was one of the few that had a finite number of web sites I used to use that made Google virtually useless to me. The only search engine I use now is DDG. It was as insane marginalising Google back then as so many other tech fads since then, including IOT, Bitcoin, XP/agile, Netbooks, 3D TVs (remember those?), and so on. There is an upside to not having used anything Google - to this day I have zero reliance on any single product of theirs.

jimpick 6y ago

I joined a set-top box startup in 2002 based in Palo Alto (Digeo) that ran out of the former Altavista offices - same building as PAIX. https://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2009/02/11/paix-a-key-hub-from-alta-vista-to-facebook https://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2009/02/11/paix... I ran a build cluster in the server room in the basement where Altavista used to be located. The server room was actually pretty small - just a few rows of racks. We still had a sign in our office that said "Altavista Operations". It's pretty mindblowing just thinking how small internet-scale things were back then compared to now.

jve 6y ago

Ahh, that day when I was introduced with the search engine & internet, they took us some kids to library PCs. The librarian instructed us to open altavista and said: If you want to find Mr. Bean and will search for "Bean", you will find... beans. Type "Mr. Bean". Only years later someone told me about google.

mech422 6y ago

I still miss AltaVista's query language. So much better at narrowing stuff down to _exactly_ want you wanted then google is, even today. Between googles "let me guess what you want and ignore search terms" and their paid placements, page 1 of the SERP is useless for technical work. Doubly so if your researching something obscure...

wintorez 6y ago

The first good search engine was metacrawler.

dbsmith83 6y ago

I remember AltaVista even had a free dialup service. IIRC, it was like netzero, in that it displayed ads in a window that stayed on top. Of course, I would just find the window handle and set it to invisible

TylerE 6y ago

This line from the Wiki jumped out at me: > As of 1998, it used 20 multi-processor machines using DEC's 64-bit Alpha processor. Together, the back-end machines had 130 GB of RAM and 500 GB of hard disk drive space, I'm typing this on a machine with 20 threads, 64GB of RAM, and a hair over 12TB of disk.