4 ms·
OMG I remember trying Google when it was in beta, and HOLY CRAP what I had been using was like freakin night and day. AltaVista: remember that? That was the sta
by palad1n 2y ago
OMG I remember trying Google when it was in beta, and HOLY CRAP what I had been using was like freakin night and day. AltaVista: remember that? That was the state of the art before that, and it did not compare. Night and day.
- wenc 2y agoI remember Google being marginally better than Altavista but not much more. The cool kids in those days used Metacrawler, which meta searched all the search engines.
- dolmen 2y agoYes, Altavista was the major step over Yahoo! directory.
- gizajob 2y agoYou just gave me a weird flashback to 1997. And hey maybe when combined with GPT-4o AskJeeves will finally work as intended.
- sgerenser 2y agoI used Metacrawler, it was dog slow. The beauty of Google was it was super fast, and still returned results that were at least as good, and often better, than Metacrawler. After using Google 2-3 times I don’t think I ever used Metacrawler again.
- kevindamm 2y agoGoogle was marginally better in popular searches and significantly better for tail searches. This is a big reason why it flourished with the technical and student crowd in earlier days because those exceedingly rare sub-sub-topics would get surfaced higher in the rankings. For the esoteric topics Yahoo didn't have it in catalog and Altavista maybe had it but it was on page 86. Even before spelling correction and dozens of other useful search features were added, it was tail search and finding what you were looking for sooner. Serving speed, too, but perhaps that was more subtle for some. Metasearch only helps recall. It won't help precision, the metasearch still needs to rank the aggregate results.
- sethammons 2y agoRemember dogpile? Great aggregator
- macintux 2y agoWith Altavista I had to go through 2 or 3 pages just to find the GNU website. I remember the Google beta as life-changing.