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I miss Altavista. I could generally either find exactly what I was looking for inside of three iterations of refining the search, or find that it wasn't to be f
by User23 5y ago
I miss Altavista. I could generally either find exactly what I was looking for inside of three iterations of refining the search, or find that it wasn't to be found.
I still just want a blazing fast full text search of the reachable WWW that understands regexes and a basic predicate calculus. Unfortunately the overhead and small potential user base means that under the current regime such a thing will never be made.
Speaking of, if any government actually wants competition, they don't need to break up Google, they just need to force them to offer full access to their cache and compute at some reasonable rate, much like how the ILECs were made to carry the CLECs' traffic.
- otherotherchris 5y agoCommon crawl already exists and is nearly as good as Google's index.
- marginalia_nu 5y agoCommon crawl is just a dataset, not an index. The difficulty is not finding a sufficiently large haystack, it's getting at the needles.
- bunabhucan 5y agoDo you miss Altavista or do you miss the size of the web in the late 1990s?
- carabiner 5y agoAll right, I think this comment is peak HN.