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A Eulogy For AltaVista, The Google Of Its Time
- joshuak 13y agoI remember when google came out I didn't quite understand what was different, and hated the fact that I couldn't use operators such as +-(). The feeling lucky button further reinforced the feeling that google was a dumbed down interface for the masses that wasn't for professionals. Took me a bit to realize that the results where better then AltaVista regardless of the reduced sculptability. EDIT: haha now it's been so long I've even forgotten the operators. They where the boolean operators AND, OR, NOT etc. spelled out, and other very useful sculpting tools. http://www.netstrider.com/search/altavista.html http://www.netstrider.com/search/altavista.html
- wslh 13y agoIn the early times of Google I switched back and forth to Altavista because the NEAR operator was the way to adjust the precision of my terms.
- threeseed 13y agoI remember when Google came out and vividly remember what was different. It was the UI. It was clean, sparse and without any ads. For me the search results were across the board worse than Altavista but better specifically in searching API documentation.
- sixothree 13y agoIt's hard to believe today but one innovation in the google home page was that you didn't actually have to click into the text box to begin typing. For some reason every other search engine at the time required you to do this one little extra step.
- voltagex_ 13y agoAKA the "Billion Dollar Javascript" - http://www.branded3.com/blogs/billion-dollar-javascript/ http://www.branded3.com/blogs/billion-dollar-javascript/
- hayksaakian 13y agoThanks for the link, it was a great read.
- altcognito 13y agoIn the initial time where alta vista were seriously co-existing as search engines (on that graph, in the time before they crossed paths in usage) Alta Vista was a little nicer because it really was a much more raw look at the web. If I did a search for 4 keywords in a row, the first ten hits were generally an exact match. (there weren't as many cloned sites etc... so this was a reasonable thing to do) I miss that aspect of the web.
- rodgerd 13y agoReally? I started using Google before it had its own domain, and was eagerly showing to people. AltaVista had started shitting up its interface with intrusive ads by then IIRC, but more importantly while the arcane combinations I needed to get decent results made me feel like a wizard, I could get as good if not better responses just typing a few terms into Google.
- altcognito 13y agoThat's what I remember, but yknow, it's been over a decade so memories fade. I remember that it took me a little bit of time to transition from trying to guess combinations of words that would appear in my target documents to just utilizing keywords.
- ChuckMcM 13y agoI agree with Danny it is a sad sendoff for what was such a transformative technology. DEC never did understand open anything, and the Internet was always more of threat to them than a way to move forward.
- PommeDeTerre 13y agoMaybe licensing issues would prevent it, or make it difficult or costly to do, but I think it would be superb if at least some of the source code powering AltaVista were to be released under a liberal open source license. This is especially true if it's no longer a feasible product. The code from the Digital era, for instance, would be quite a contribution to the Internet community, even if just for the sake of preserving historically-important software.
- cmarschner 13y agoAltaVista has been a front-end for Yahoo search for >10 years... Not a lot of source code left...
- PommeDeTerre 13y agoIs this just speculation? Or do you have first-hand experience at Yahoo!, or something to that effect, to back up this claim?
- mcintyre1994 13y agoNo experience at Yahoo! here, but a quick look at the AltaVista page suggests the parent is correct. The tabs eg. images, video, lead directly to subdomains of search.yahoo.com, so everything except web is handled very transparently on Yahoo's own pages. More importantly, the action on the Alta Vista search form itself is (for me, I assume some of this is dynamically generated): http://us.yhs4.search.yahoo.com/r/_ylt=A0oG7pc8zNBRgwMAFJel87UF/SIG=11unuvm0e/EXP=1372667068/**http%3a//us.yhs4.search.yahoo.com/yhs/search http://us.yhs4.search.yahoo.com/r/_ylt=A0oG7pc8zNBRgwMAFJel8... Note that the action on the yahoo.com (US) search form is: http://search.yahoo.com/search;_ylt=AkYpzVmc8WkqPKbMSU46mpqbvZx4 http://search.yahoo.com/search;_ylt=AkYpzVmc8WkqPKbMSU46mpqb... It's certainly not complete proof, but it does seem that altavista.com search is handled by search.yahoo.com in a similar way to yahoo.com itself.
- PommeDeTerre 13y ago
- Zigurd 13y agoIt must be depressing sometimes to think of things like AltaVista that Yahoo had run into the ground under leadership that apparently didn't understand the assets they owned. When AltaVista first appeared, I had used Lexis quite a bit, and had built my own inverted index for law forms. I thought "Wow, you can do that to Web pages!" But it is even more depressing to keeping dragging the corpse of AltaVista around. Time to let go.
- mathattack 13y agoExactly. Once Google beat it, no need to keep the corpse around. Not sure what Yahoo could do. Their own search had already surrendered.
- robryan 13y agoI guess they had a significant amount of people who had never moved on. Better to serve them up something they knew than push they to Yahoo search and have then actually think about searching options. Over time I guess that number become small enough that maintaining a separate brand is no longer worth the likely small amount of effort to do it.
- rodgerd 13y agoHonestly, it's more depressing to think of the things Digital ran into the ground: VMS (let's keep it expensive and hard to get ahold of while Unix is getting cheaper, and oh, then we'll decide we're a Windows shop anyway). Flogging off their database technology to Oracle. Alpha. Poor, poor Alpha. The waste of giving the StrongARM to Intel, who would ultimately kill it. AltaVista, of course. Tru64's good bits (like AdvFS) was criminally wasted, although I guess that's more HP's fault in the end.
- Zigurd 13y agoVery true. DEC could have been a major router maker, could have been Google, could have been a major CPU maker, could have been a major database vendor, and could have had a major piece of the PC business. That's got to be the world championship of neglecting great engineering (maybe excepting Xerox). Poor AltaVista went from a neglectful parent to a neglectful foster home.
- privacybuff 13y agoI remember the first time I used AltaVista, in 1995 or so. I had previously used Yahoo (which was a directory back then) and was pretty astounded at what AltaVista could do. I remember a similar feeling the first time I used Google years later.
- _delirium 13y agobabelfish.altavista.com was also the translate.google.com of its time
- jahmed 13y agoAhhh babelfish. So many poorly translated high school spanish papers.
- rsync 13y agoI miss altavista every single day. Every time I search for a collection of terms, and then click the links, and page-search for one of those terms, and it's not in the page. Google wastes my time like this 3-4 times per day.
- PavlovsCat 13y agoYou can use "intext:blah" to make sure "blah" actually occurs in the page body itself: http://www.googleguide.com/advanced_operators_reference.html http://www.googleguide.com/advanced_operators_reference.html
- joshuak 13y agoJust out of curiosity why is search text actually occurring in the page body an 'advanced' feature?
- PavlovsCat 13y agoBecause there are many factors taken into consideration by default, like anchor text of links to a page or the URL.
- zzzz123 13y agoone factor is "search for keywords that the user didn't search for"
- joshuak 13y agoWell I ment that a little facetiously. However, I agree those things should be taken into account--in addition to including documents with the terms you ask for in them. Pages with my terms (in order) should be the absolute highest ranked, and it should go down from there. At least if we're talking about building an intuitive google vs. really aggravating google.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- felixfurtak 13y agoIf my memory serves me AltaVista had good newsgroup support too. It was even possible to manually uudecode binary files from the search results.
- jmboling 13y agoSadly, google was just easier to type.
- dm8 13y agoI believe people like Jeff Dean and Sanjay Ghemawat who became instrumental in Google's success came from DEC. I'm sure they brought lot of talented folks from DEC that paved what Google's search dominance.
- whiddershins 13y agoI remember teaching a friend how to research a topic by sitting her down in front of the computer, and showing her how to search all 5 major engines instead of just one, thereby getting a number of perspectives on the topic. This article makes me seriously nostalgic.
- INTPenis 13y agoI remember the dark side, astalavista. My entry into the world of exploratory computing. ;)
- henrikschroder 13y agoI remember the domain switch, and how previously the guy who actually had altavista.com used to have a little box on his personal website telling people looking for that other altavista search thing to go over here...
- xedarius 13y agoI remember sitting around my friends house and he showed me AltaVista, I think previously I had been using Yahoo. He said have a go, so I typed some stuff into the box and then it listed a bunch of stuff, "cool eh?", my friend said. "Well kind of", I replied, but none of the things it returned are what I'm looking for. Oh no, that's not how it works, he explained. You have then find your actual results somewhere on the 2nd or 3rd page. Or narrow the results with a curious combinations of + and -. If only I had connected the dots perhaps I would have written Google myself.
- drallison 13y agoAltavista's creator and original implementor was Paul Flaherty (1964-2006) (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Flaherty http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Flaherty). Altavista (altavista.dec.com) began life in his office at the DEC Network Research Lab in Palo Alto, CA. As Altavista usage grew, it consumed machines (alphas in those days), filling his office and moving into the hallway. Eventually it moved to its own facility and became something more than a research project. Altavista was, pre-Google, the best of the search engines. I am fairly sure that the original idea for Altavista was a droll comment made by Andy Freeman at lunch that sketched the possibility of a smarter-than-inverted-list search engine for the Internet; Paul made it all happen.