Dunno, my memory of AltaVista that it (1) seemed amazing when it first showed up (it was, after all, the first), but one quickly realized that it (2) actually s

Dunno, my memory of AltaVista that it (1) seemed amazing when it first showed up (it was, after all, the first), but one quickly realized that it (2) actually sorta sucked: almost every search involved trawling through enormous numbers of search-result pages full of barely relevant results. Google was a huge, huge, improvement over AltaVista. There's a good reason they won the search wars.