4 ms·

> Alta-Vista were still loading Your memory is faulty. AltaVista was always super fast--it never had the advertising bloat that the other ones had until the v

by bsder 4mo ago

> Alta-Vista were still loading Your memory is faulty. AltaVista was always super fast--it never had the advertising bloat that the other ones had until the very end. The problem AltaVista had was that it didn't scale when the Internet went exponential--so AltaVista would give you good search results until you asked current, topical questions. AltaVista relied on running a single, super-expensive stonking huge Alpha machine while Google ran on lots of commodity servers that spidered constantly.

BryantD 4mo ago
This is inaccurate. When I was running AV operations around 2000, we were running on a couple dozen huge Alpha machines for the index layer and queries. We had a bunch of smaller machines for Web serving, and a high memory set of Alphas as a caching layer. See https://www.usenix.org/legacy/publications/library/proceedings/ana97/summaries/monier.html https://www.usenix.org/legacy/publications/library/proceedin... for the 1997 server count, which was before we got to the three tier architecture. We also spidered constantly. A couple of those huge backend Alphas were dedicated to holding the constant spider index. AV had a well earned reputation for quick discovery, although I think Google wound up faster. We suffered a bit from maintaining separate indexes for the main corpus and recent pages, and I imagine Google handled that better. But the period of time when our main index went to hell was the period of time when we failed to do a new main index crawl for several months. I won’t get into why that happened politically because my memory isn’t perfect and I don’t want to criticize anyone who won’t see this to stand up for themselves, but it’s absolutely the case that we let the index get stale. And I will say that I think the execs were distracted by the idea of challenging Yahoo by buying a shopping site and a local news site of sorts and, unlike the Google of the time, they lacked the wisdom to focus on our primary product. And now I fade back into the hedges, until the next time AV comes up… I suspect a high percentage of my HN comments are on this exact topic. It makes me sad.
- bsder 4mo ago
  I stand corrected. Thanks for all your work. And I still miss the AltaVista illustrated diagram (Java Applet) that would allow you to drill down and specialize the search results. No modern search has ever matched that, again.
  - jhy 4mo ago
    That feature sounds amazing! I tried searching wayback etc but wasn't able to find any more details. Do you happen to know of any screenshots / deeper descriptions for it? Perhaps we could nerd snipe Marginalia Search to add it :)
    - bsder 4mo ago
      I remember it being a Java applet with animations, but my memory could be terribly faulty at this point. Following your comments and trying to trail things out, the only thing I can find is a reference to AltaVista LiveTopics. https://dannysullivan.com/why-search-sucks-you-wont-fix-it-the-way-you-think-203 https://dannysullivan.com/why-search-sucks-you-wont-fix-it-t... I suspect what I used was that "GRAPH" button in the AltaVista Refine picture. We might want to archive that image. It seems like the only evidence that this stuff ever existed.
      - jhy 4mo ago
        Thanks, AltaVista LiveTopics is a good keyword. I found: https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Alta-Vista-LiveTopic-Graph_fig2_247392753 https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Alta-Vista-LiveTopic-Gra... which has some different coverage. I did try to archive the blog you linked but unfortunately the owner is blocking it with robots.txt User-agent: ia_archiver Disallow: /
        bsder 4mo ago
        That hyperbolic tree looks very close to what my faulty memory recalls. I suspect it was a later incarnation that I used.
  - BryantD 4mo ago
    It was a fun place to be. Sorry if I came across as curt — rereading that I was a bit more blunt than I intended. Sick cat has been stressing me.
    - 4mo ago
- BobbyTables2 4mo ago
  FWIW, I preferred AltaVista over Google back in the day.
- panick21_ 4mo ago
  From the oral history interviews, it seem one of the tricks was keeping the core algorithm in cache completely.
  - BryantD 4mo ago
    I was not a software engineer but yeah, I think so. Every now and then we’d have to go get Mike Burrows to do some consulting work to rewrite a bit more of the code in assembly.
- radicalbyte 4mo ago
  Thanks for replying, now I remember why I used to spend all day on this site :-) A lot of the political changes and my exposure to some of the VC people outside of public view have soured tech for me. That and the current cult-like behaviour and clear fraud from the crypto and now AI waves... anyhow, I digress. We were big AV users initially, I think for 2 years? This was 94-97 so my memory of the time periods is fuzzy. When Google came along I have very vivid memory of it providing not only better search results but also faster loads times. I wonder if Google was already geo-distributed at the time? Latency was real then, it wasn't uncommon to hit 350ms (compared to 20-50ms to Europe) and the difference would have been felt back then. It was a killer for Counter Strike.
bparsons 4mo ago
Webcrawler was faster than both!
radicalbyte 4mo ago
No it wasn't. Google had a tiny front page back then, Alta-Vista was visibly slower. Very similar to Excite. All of the others were terrible.

by bsder 4mo ago

BryantD 4mo ago

This is inaccurate. When I was running AV operations around 2000, we were running on a couple dozen huge Alpha machines for the index layer and queries. We had a bunch of smaller machines for Web serving, and a high memory set of Alphas as a caching layer. See https://www.usenix.org/legacy/publications/library/proceedings/ana97/summaries/monier.html https://www.usenix.org/legacy/publications/library/proceedin... for the 1997 server count, which was before we got to the three tier architecture. We also spidered constantly. A couple of those huge backend Alphas were dedicated to holding the constant spider index. AV had a well earned reputation for quick discovery, although I think Google wound up faster. We suffered a bit from maintaining separate indexes for the main corpus and recent pages, and I imagine Google handled that better. But the period of time when our main index went to hell was the period of time when we failed to do a new main index crawl for several months. I won’t get into why that happened politically because my memory isn’t perfect and I don’t want to criticize anyone who won’t see this to stand up for themselves, but it’s absolutely the case that we let the index get stale. And I will say that I think the execs were distracted by the idea of challenging Yahoo by buying a shopping site and a local news site of sorts and, unlike the Google of the time, they lacked the wisdom to focus on our primary product. And now I fade back into the hedges, until the next time AV comes up… I suspect a high percentage of my HN comments are on this exact topic. It makes me sad.

bsder 4mo ago
I stand corrected. Thanks for all your work. And I still miss the AltaVista illustrated diagram (Java Applet) that would allow you to drill down and specialize the search results. No modern search has ever matched that, again.
- jhy 4mo ago
  That feature sounds amazing! I tried searching wayback etc but wasn't able to find any more details. Do you happen to know of any screenshots / deeper descriptions for it? Perhaps we could nerd snipe Marginalia Search to add it :)
  - bsder 4mo ago
    I remember it being a Java applet with animations, but my memory could be terribly faulty at this point. Following your comments and trying to trail things out, the only thing I can find is a reference to AltaVista LiveTopics. https://dannysullivan.com/why-search-sucks-you-wont-fix-it-the-way-you-think-203 https://dannysullivan.com/why-search-sucks-you-wont-fix-it-t... I suspect what I used was that "GRAPH" button in the AltaVista Refine picture. We might want to archive that image. It seems like the only evidence that this stuff ever existed.
    - jhy 4mo ago
      Thanks, AltaVista LiveTopics is a good keyword. I found: https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Alta-Vista-LiveTopic-Graph_fig2_247392753 https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Alta-Vista-LiveTopic-Gra... which has some different coverage. I did try to archive the blog you linked but unfortunately the owner is blocking it with robots.txt User-agent: ia_archiver Disallow: /
      - bsder 4mo ago
        That hyperbolic tree looks very close to what my faulty memory recalls. I suspect it was a later incarnation that I used.
- BryantD 4mo ago
  It was a fun place to be. Sorry if I came across as curt — rereading that I was a bit more blunt than I intended. Sick cat has been stressing me.
  - 4mo ago
BobbyTables2 4mo ago
FWIW, I preferred AltaVista over Google back in the day.
panick21_ 4mo ago
From the oral history interviews, it seem one of the tricks was keeping the core algorithm in cache completely.
- BryantD 4mo ago
  I was not a software engineer but yeah, I think so. Every now and then we’d have to go get Mike Burrows to do some consulting work to rewrite a bit more of the code in assembly.
radicalbyte 4mo ago
Thanks for replying, now I remember why I used to spend all day on this site :-) A lot of the political changes and my exposure to some of the VC people outside of public view have soured tech for me. That and the current cult-like behaviour and clear fraud from the crypto and now AI waves... anyhow, I digress. We were big AV users initially, I think for 2 years? This was 94-97 so my memory of the time periods is fuzzy. When Google came along I have very vivid memory of it providing not only better search results but also faster loads times. I wonder if Google was already geo-distributed at the time? Latency was real then, it wasn't uncommon to hit 350ms (compared to 20-50ms to Europe) and the difference would have been felt back then. It was a killer for Counter Strike.

bparsons 4mo ago

Webcrawler was faster than both!

radicalbyte 4mo ago

No it wasn't. Google had a tiny front page back then, Alta-Vista was visibly slower. Very similar to Excite. All of the others were terrible.