3 ms·
Search before Google was awful. Remember Altavista?
by icedchai 4y ago
Search before Google was awful. Remember Altavista?
- codebolt 4y agoMaybe I was just too young to know better, but I seem to remember AltaVista being pretty decent. My internet was super slow back then anyway, so the search latency probably didn't make a huge difference.
- drewg123 4y agoYes, it was great. I'd love to have it back. 20+ years ago, I could search for exactly what I wanted. Today's search engines often give me a page or so of irrelevant but popular results before I find what I need.
- m3rc 4y agoI think that's a little silly, You can get a google search to look for hyper specific stuff it just requires a little bit of massaging. It was not at all true that there was no massaging required when asking Jeeves for something.
- ipaddr 4y agoGood luck getting hyper specific stuff now that Google isn't including most of the web in their index anymore. Google quality is the same as AskJeeves was. That's where we ended up with no AltaVista and bing copying results from google.
- drewg123 4y agoI wonder if it is time for somebody to disrupt web search again? Are there any search engines doing full indexing?
- iso1631 4y agoGoogle exposed the wheat from the chaff. But since then google has fallen way down, and search is back to being awful and full of chaff. Whether that's because we have higher expectations, or because the chaff producers have adapted and google has failed to adapt to their adaptation doesn't change the fact that search is back to being a chore like it was in 1998.
- icedchai 4y agoIt has gotten worse, but to say it's back to 1998 levels is a bit much. The web was orders of magnitude smaller then, and Altavista still sucked.