No, the differences were fundamental. AltaVista was architecturally very different, independent of ads. It's a long time ago but if I recall correctly, AltaVis

No, the differences were fundamental. AltaVista was architecturally very different, independent of ads. It's a long time ago but if I recall correctly, AltaVista: - Ran on a tiny handful of big iron machines. It was actually built as an advert for ultra-high end server hardware (from DEC I think?). It couldn't scale up index size as a result. Google used lots of cheap Linux machines with distributed algorithms, which could fit the entire index in RAM. - Partly as a consequence, relied mostly on meta keywords rather than what was actually in the page. But site authors were SEO-ing the meta keywords like crazy and they were often irrelevant. - Didn't have any global ranking function like PageRank. Result was Google's ranking was way better, and they could serve way faster, and they could scale up much more easily.