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AltaVista was the best search engine before Google came out. Now Firefox's spellchecker is telling me it's not even a word.

Sami_Lehtinen 13y ago
Don't you remember WebCrawler? Ok, it's older than AltaVista, and didn't have such quality results. But search service called HotBot provided substantially better results than AltaVista before Google. I remember time of many specialized search engines. But when Google results started to be fresher and better, it was clear that time for smaller search engines was simply over.
- jacques_chester 13y ago
  The main point of AltaVista was that it was fast. It was actually marketing for HP-née-Compaq-née-DEC's Alpha servers.
  - dredmorbius 13y ago
    More specifically: 64 bit ULTRIX. The search index was held in memory.
    - dredmorbius 13y ago
      Correction: Tru64, the Alpha achitecture successor to ULTRIX. But still: the idea was to demonstrate the massive (for the age) memory capabilities of 64-bit processing. And it was a rather impressive demonstration for the time. Still, it also pointed at the limitation of monolithic single-systems architectures. For those interested in the history of The New New Thing, for much of the 1980s and 1990s, focus on supercomputing was on massive NUMA parallel architectures. What we've seen instead is a gradual increase in core densities, leveraging economies where these exist, but a principle focus on distributed, multi-system architectures. With very few exceptions, supercomputers and massive public-facing Web architectures focus on designs of redundant, mass deployments of essentially similar (not necessarily identical) commodity x86 (and successor) hardware. Or GPU hardware for quantitatively intensive applications.
- gfosco 13y ago
  Dogpile was pretty awesome for a while in those days..
- gcb0 13y ago
  I'm almost sure AltaVista was just the first one to have porn... Mean, image search.

Sami_Lehtinen 13y ago

Don't you remember WebCrawler? Ok, it's older than AltaVista, and didn't have such quality results. But search service called HotBot provided substantially better results than AltaVista before Google. I remember time of many specialized search engines. But when Google results started to be fresher and better, it was clear that time for smaller search engines was simply over.

jacques_chester 13y ago
The main point of AltaVista was that it was fast. It was actually marketing for HP-née-Compaq-née-DEC's Alpha servers.
- dredmorbius 13y ago
  More specifically: 64 bit ULTRIX. The search index was held in memory.
  - dredmorbius 13y ago
    Correction: Tru64, the Alpha achitecture successor to ULTRIX. But still: the idea was to demonstrate the massive (for the age) memory capabilities of 64-bit processing. And it was a rather impressive demonstration for the time. Still, it also pointed at the limitation of monolithic single-systems architectures. For those interested in the history of The New New Thing, for much of the 1980s and 1990s, focus on supercomputing was on massive NUMA parallel architectures. What we've seen instead is a gradual increase in core densities, leveraging economies where these exist, but a principle focus on distributed, multi-system architectures. With very few exceptions, supercomputers and massive public-facing Web architectures focus on designs of redundant, mass deployments of essentially similar (not necessarily identical) commodity x86 (and successor) hardware. Or GPU hardware for quantitatively intensive applications.
gfosco 13y ago
Dogpile was pretty awesome for a while in those days..
gcb0 13y ago
I'm almost sure AltaVista was just the first one to have porn... Mean, image search.