4 ms·

Altavista was fantastic and represented a features and usability high water mark that was never passed by google. Full boolean operator search with "literals"

by rsync 5mo ago

Altavista 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 5mo ago
It is absolutely insane to say that Altavista was better than Google though.
seanmcdirmid 5mo ago
I 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 5mo ago
  I 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 5mo ago
Agreed. 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 5mo ago
  I 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 5mo ago
  Google 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 5mo 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 5mo ago
  Right, 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 5mo ago
    They 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 5mo ago
It 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 5mo ago
Try Kagi, it implements them quite well.
mc32 5mo ago
I think they also allowed distance between words (within x) to increase relevance.
kevin_thibedeau 5mo ago
The "near" operator was gold.
fsckboy 5mo ago
i 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 5mo ago
  You 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 5mo ago
Altavista 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 5mo ago
Seconded 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

by rsync 5mo ago

zorked 5mo ago

It is absolutely insane to say that Altavista was better than Google though.

seanmcdirmid 5mo ago

I 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 5mo ago
I 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 5mo ago

Agreed. 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 5mo ago
I 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 5mo ago
Google 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 5mo 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 5mo ago
Right, 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 5mo ago
  They 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 5mo ago

It 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 5mo ago

Try Kagi, it implements them quite well.

mc32 5mo ago

I think they also allowed distance between words (within x) to increase relevance.

kevin_thibedeau 5mo ago

The "near" operator was gold.

fsckboy 5mo ago

i 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 5mo ago
You 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 5mo ago

Altavista 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 5mo ago

Seconded 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