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None of the search engines from that era were really good. AltaVista was perhaps the best, but AskJeeves was up there and people used multiple. AltaVista, AskJe
by stingraycharles 6mo ago
None of the search engines from that era were really good. AltaVista was perhaps the best, but AskJeeves was up there and people used multiple. AltaVista, AskJeeves, Yahoo, etc. They all had their pros and cons.
Then Google arrived and showed them what a “good” search engine was like.
- bandrami 6mo agoAnd at the time it was still an open question whether search engines or curated oracles like Yahoo would be what stuck in the long term.
- rsync 6mo agoAltavista was fantastic and represented a features and usability high water mark that was never passed by google. Full boolean operator search with "literals" actually respected, negative search terms worked as advertised, etc. None of that ever worked properly, consistently, at google.
- zorked 6mo agoIt is absolutely insane to say that Altavista was better than Google though.
- seanmcdirmid 6mo agoI would think that 90% of the principals at DEC/Compaq WRL working on AltaVista would have moved to google, their first office was nearby in downtown Palo Alto back in 1999.
- jfil 6mo agoI used to read through search engine patents back in 2006-7 when I was an SEO consultant. I could see the same names from the AltaVista patents later start appearing as authors on the Google patents.
- mrandish 6mo agoAgreed. AltaVista was the best of the pre-Google search engines. I seem to remember Google having negative terms, literals and booleans (at least or/and) - although they weren't well documented, they worked. Amazon had literals and negative terms too for many years. Now searching on both of those sites is "search theater", where they pretend to give targeted results while burying the result you're looking for just deep enough to maximize page views before too many users bounce. I fucking hate we now live in a world where leading companies A/B test precisely how much they can degrade their core product value and annoy users knowing they're safe from competitors because startups know if they threaten Google/Amazon on that stuff they'll just put back the minimum functionality long enough to ensure the new player dies.
- akafred 6mo agoI pay for kagi on my personal machine, it is always a delight when my cmd-t search is answered kagi and not a list of ads ...
- 1313ed01 6mo agoGoogle did for a long time have a page documenting those features. Picked a random date from around the time I know they had that. Clicked Adcanced Search, then a link near the top of the page to Advanced Search Tips. https://web.archive.org/web/20041017053307/http://www.google.com/help/refinesearch.html https://web.archive.org/web/20041017053307/http://www.google...
- thayne 6mo ago> None of that ever worked properly, consistently, at google. My experience is it worked pretty well on Google for a while, but then it got progressively worse.
- stingraycharles 6mo agoRight, for this first 5 years or so, it worked. But then they started to optimize for “the masses”, and they don’t use boolean logic in queries.
- toyg 6mo agoThey optimized for ad impressions. There was no technical reason not to keep around a Boolean mode - some competitors effectively exist because of that single feature.
- yread 6mo agoIt worked pretty well on early google and altavista. Find an archive of searchlores.org from that era and see for yourself. +Fravia had documented and tested the features quite thoroughly
- decimalenough 6mo agoTry Kagi, it implements them quite well.
- mc32 6mo agoI think they also allowed distance between words (within x) to increase relevance.
- kevin_thibedeau 6mo agoThe "near" operator was gold.
- fsckboy 6mo agoi don't know precisely the architectures they both used (i tend not to study things that are changing and over which i have no control), but here's what I would say: I like boolean and literalism etc., I like control and syntactic precision, and I did not prefer google when it first got traction and buzz, but within six months of that, google's "page ranked" back-end database was clearly superior to what altavista's front-end queries could do with their own back end data. it shocked me when people I thought I knew well would say "I always hit google's "I feel lucky" to go straight to the top search result. Me, I prefer to pore through results looking for nuance and to fine tune my query. google was giving me much better results to look at, even if I had less control for fine tuning. Google has relentlessly over time diminished literalism in queries in favor of mass market popularity. As an overly simplistic example, when I look up Thor, I am never interested in any film or who was in it, and that's pretty much all you get now. Alexander the Great is an incredible figure from history, shaping the geo landscape in ways that still affect us today, but searchwise he's just a fictionalized portrayal by a celebrity who don't even have his own authenticity.
- nemo 6mo agoYou might want to search for "alexander the great" again, and also, maybe use "Alexander IV" or "Alexander of Macedon". I'm an amateur Classicist I look up ancient figures all that time, obscure and well known to check wikipedia on things, and I've never seen it prioritize that film above the figure, though perhaps it did when that movie was recent. Pity about Thor and the MCU, though.
- calvinmorrison 6mo agoAltavista was like the 'free' version of what some libraries had for via paid search subscriptions. At the time where search was a tool that you had to you know.. come up with various terms (remember Google Whacks) and find results about it. RIP Altavista
- 1vuio0pswjnm7 6mo agoSeconded Google took a different approach to web search For me AltaVista was superior. It seemed that people who were not particularky good at searching prefered Google Perhaps this explains its popularity
- kwoff 6mo agoExactly. Before google came out in I think 1998, I had several bookmarked sites like excite.com, altavista, dogpile, yahoo, and yes askjeeves. You kinda had a feeling for which one would be good for which kind of search. But then google came along...
- tptacek 6mo agoI remember AltaVista being the only really credible search engine prior to Google (I took a brief detour to Excite but kept going back to AltaVista). Jeeves I only remember for the freeform query gimmick.
- helterskelter 6mo agoAround this time you also had meta search engines, which gave you the dedup'd results of all the major search engines at the time. There was MetaCrawler and Dogpile from what I remember, both of which are oddly still around.
- bsder 6mo agoAltaVista had a Java applet that would visualize the "clusters" that a search produced. You could then click on a "cluster" in order to exclude all the irrelevant ones and the search results would update. For example: Searching on "python" would give you two obvious clusters one for "reptiles" and one for "programming languages". Clicking on the appropriate cluster would screen out all the irrelevant ones. This is a feature still unmatched by any search engine today.
- krater23 6mo agoI've never seen this feature despite using a lot altavista back then. What a pity
- throwatdem12311 6mo agoAnd now every search engine has been flooded with SEO’d AI slop and they all suck again.
- Zambyte 6mo agoKagi has done a good job of making it easy to cut through slop so far. I never really deal with slop search results
- DeathArrow 6mo agoAlta Vista had more relevant search results than Google has now.
- zombot 6mo agoFor all practical purposes, internet search is dead or dying. It has been enshittified to perfection by multiple parties. Those who could have been called users in a previous life are the ones getting the least use out of it. For a brief period of time, LLMs can help. Until their inevitable decay into ad-infested hellscapes makes them just as useless. They don't have ad blockers.
- Barbing 6mo agoYou hear analysts talk about the majority of corporations being in the infancy of their understanding of language models. Shudder to think of the slop mature players will put out.
- bsimpson 6mo agoDon't forget WebCrawler!
- cm2187 6mo agoAltaVista and HotBot for me. Yahoo wasn't a search engine, it was a manually curated website directory (with a hierarchical structure), which was great for finding similar websites if you found one you liked.
- eduction 6mo agoYou could get search results on yahoo. The directory results would come first and then search results from their current “partner.” At one point it was Inktomi, the Berkeley company behind HotBot. At one point it was Google. Before them, one of the more generic ones.
- iammrpayments 6mo agoI remember vividly how lycos was much better than google
- thr0waway001 6mo agoYahoo was pretty good until they removed comments from their posts as well as removing Yahoo Answers. I loved the chaos of Yahoo answers. I remember messed up questions like “Can humans get preggo from midgets” and things of that nature.
- kid64 6mo agoNobody remembers Hotbot. Google before Google.
- xnx 6mo agoI remember. Powered by Inktomi.
- stevekemp 6mo agoI cannot read AltaVista without thinking of Astalavista[.box.sk].
- krater23 6mo agoMee to :D