
Altavista: The rise and fall of the biggest pre-Google search engine - cromat3
https://digital.com/about/altavista/
======
BryantD
This article misses one of the primary reasons for AV's demise -- we didn't
update our primary index for several months just as Google was gaining
mindshare. A ridiculously high percentage of our front page links were 404s,
while Google was always fresh.

This was particularly bad because one of our earlier strong points was fresh
indexes. Our ability to refresh the supplementary index on the fly was
awesome. When you lose one of your primary strengths, it's noticeable.

I don't mean to minimize the downside of losing focus. That's one of the
biggest lessons I learned while working there. I'd say that our failure to
maintain a high quality index was directly caused by our loss of focus, in
fact. But it's important to remember that both UI and the underlying index
quality matter.

"What about PageRank?"

Eh, not actually unique to Google. Remember that Jon Kleinberg was developing
HITS in parallel -- AV was well aware of the concept of measuring page
importance using incoming links, and we had our own implementation. It may not
have been as good. It's hard to tell when your underlying data source is
stale.

Also, any AV article which doesn't note that we bought Elon Musk's first
company is inherently flawed. ;)

~~~
cpeterso
From the article: _" [Alta Vista] broadened the use of boolean operators in
search. Like some competing search engines, it supported AND, OR, and NOT."_

My recollection is that Alta Vista supported boolean operators, but defaulted
to _OR_ while Google defaulted to _AND_. So searching Alta Vista for something
like "$CommonWord $UncommonWord" would return results with high-ranking pages
for $CommonWord that drown out all the low-scoring pages for $UncommonWord,
whereas Google would return results that match the intersection (which would
actually be relevant to the user's query). I'm convinced this default might
have made a bigger impact on Google's success than any PageRank magic.

~~~
anyfoo
Although it's very much anecdotical, I, too, distinctly remember that Google
defaulted to AND (unlike today, a very hard AND at the time), and that this
made a noticeable difference in searching habits.

My theory on why this might matter even for people who knew how to use the
operators is this: With OR as default, you would first try your query without
operators, get page upon page of irrelevant results, and then start to narrow
your query down. With AND as the default, you would type in the query, and if
you only got a few irrelevant results, or often no results at all, you would
try alternative terms instead.

It seems that progressing from no result to desired results by choosing
alternative terms just makes more sense than having to wade through irrelevant
stuff, and the default encourages one methodology over the other.

Today, it's very hard to make Google return no results at all. Not just
because the amount of content grew to an unimaginable scale in the meantime,
but also because Google has become way, way fuzzier in the way it interprets
search terms, likely to better suit a larger and different audience. A lot of
times today, I have to switch to "verbatim" mode first, at least for technical
stuff.

~~~
grkvlt
The problem with AND as a default is that 'normal' people (i.e. people who
have no idea what boolean means) operate search engines something like this:
1. type some words in, and get no or incorrect results; 2. add some extra
words, and repeat the search, with the idea they are making the search more
specific; 3. be confused as to why they still don't get the results they want.
a default of OR, on the other hand, means adding search terms ends up being
useful...

~~~
skj
Defaulting to AND means that you aren't just searching for the most common
term in your query that drowns out the rest. Also, adding terms narrows the
query down rather than making it more general. This behavior strikes me as far
more natural for "normal" people.

~~~
grkvlt
sure, i agree, except that they also apply this 'narrowing down' logic when
insufficient or no results are returned, thinking the query needs to be more
specific in order to work. i have observed the following sort of behaviour:

    
    
        1. entering 'invisible marmalade teapot' and getting no results
        2. changing to 'invisible marmalade teapot with tartan cosy', again nothing
        3. so 'invisible marmalade teapot with tartan cosy in outer space', ditto
    

you get the idea...? it's just like in the real world, when you might go to a
bookshop and say

    
    
        You: do you have that new crime novel in stock?
        Bookseller: er, i don't know which one you mean?
        Y: the new crime novel by john grisham, pelican something or other?
        B: oh, right, yes, here it is!
    

and everyone is happy.

default _OR_ in a search engine would mean my first example eventually
starting to return results about transparent space coffee pots with tartan
cosies, ignoring the first few terms but the rest match, which is often
helpful, particularly if you're doing an exploratory search for something
where you aren't sure of the exact details.

~~~
skj
`eventually starting to return results about transparent space coffee pots
with tartan cosies ... which is often helpful`

I don't find your examples compelling.

If you want to do an additional search that does not depend on your first
terms, you simply bring up a new search window.

In your 'real world' example, the equivalent search queries would go something
like

search: new crime novel

result: way way too much stuff

search: new crime novel john grisham pelican

result: exactly the right book because every one of those terms applies

~~~
grkvlt
Hm. I think perhaps a better way of putting it is that the hard AND issue is
when people search using a natural language type query (I know about stop
words, assume these are always filtered out) and include some extraneous term,
so 'What is that new crime novel by John Grisham about a Penguin I think?'
will return nothing, and no amount of extra terms added at the end will help,
until you delete 'Penguin'... Of course it's anecdotal, but I still suspect
it's one of the reasons for the hard AND to OR switch...

------
spudlyo
What I miss most about Altavista was the boolean search operators, and being
able to reliably insist that words either must or must not appear in the
results with the + and - characters. With Google these operators are seemingly
just hints that it feels free to ignore.

+noir +film -"pinot noir"

~~~
afandian
I'm nostagic for precise search, but I wonder how it would have fared with the
scale we have now.

(Edit: scale and diversity of input data but also audiences)

Google regularly fails to include all words I searched (even if it's only
three or four), often retrieving completely useless results. I doubt it's due
to incompetence; I take it as a signal that they're now struggling to match
the volume and characteristics of the data they have to ingest to an adequate
user experience.

~~~
itp
I suspect it's a reflection of the way the majority of their audience
interacts with search.

For a large number of people, Google's ability to answer the underlying
question, rather than explicitly identify pages where all search terms appear,
means it works better. If you think of Google as a way to get answers, this is
good.

If you think of Google as a search engine, and particularly if you have
historical experience with (and expectations of) search engines, this is very
frustrating. And the workarounds of clicking the "must contain" link (or
surrounding all of your search terms with quotation marks) are a seemingly
unnecessary inconvenience.

As a personal anecdote, I was an early adopter of smartphones (particularly
relative to a non-technical audience). So I was excited when I could speak to
my phone, then disappointed when I discovered that I had to structure my
queries and instructions very carefully.

A few years ago I was on a road trip with a very non-technical friend. We
decided to stop for Chipotle. Had it been up to me, I would probably have
pulled out my phone, opened Google Assistant (or perhaps Maps directly), and
told my phone (speaking as clearly as possible) "navigate to the closest
Chipotle" or something similar.

But I was driving, so she just pulled out her iPhone and half-shouted "I want
a burrito!" at it. And that worked just fine.

Point being, I had expectations for how things should work based on
interactions with earlier iterations of an interface. She didn't.

~~~
CharlesColeman
> If you think of Google as a search engine, and particularly if you have
> historical experience with (and expectations of) search engines, this is
> very frustrating. And the workarounds of clicking the "must contain" link
> (or surrounding all of your search terms with quotation marks) are a
> seemingly unnecessary inconvenience.

Google really needs to develop a "pro mode" search engine that works for this
use case. I get the need for an "answers engine" for less savvy users and more
casual use cases, but it's a _massive_ company. It can afford to execute two
products in its core competency (rather than umpteen messaging apps that it
will kill, along with a lot of other useless and/or doomed stuff).

~~~
cortesoft
"Google really needs to" in the sense that it would be useful, or that it
would be a good investment for them? Sure it can afford to do it, but how
would it help them make more money?

~~~
sumedh
> Sure it can afford to do it, but how would it help them make more money?
> reply

It keeps the power users on the site so they wont have to look for an
alternative. Power users if they find something better might influence no
power users to the other site

------
drallison
A few historical notes: Paul Flaherty (1964-2006) was a principal engineer at
the the Digital Equipment Network Research Laboratory. Paul is credited with
having the idea for Alta Vista, but I think that it was Andy Freeman's sudden
flash of insight that led to Paul's development.

Paul had been in Italy at a trade show; when he returned he talked with Brian
Reid, who headed the Lab, about the need to find a demonstration project that
showed off the top-of-the-line Alpha computers.

Paul and Andy and I used to have lunch together frequently. At one point, just
after Paul returned from Italy, we were talking about Internet search at
lunch. I'd been using the Magellan search engine and had some comments about
how useful a better search engine would be.

Andy began talk about the problem and sketched out how a better search engine
might work and how a web crawler could gather the information needed to do an
index.

Paul listened and then went back to his office and enlisted Brian Reid's help
in resourcing a search engine project. Brian got Louis Monier and Mike Burrows
involved. The three of them did the hard work of reducing the concept to a
real program running on an Alpha computer.

Alta Vista was an instant success with Alta Vista computers overflowing Paul's
office and cluttering the hall nearby as the team worked to satisfy market
demands for search.

~~~
DonHopkins
They sure used a lot of electricity at DECWRL!

[https://milk.com/wall-o-shame/bucket.html](https://milk.com/wall-o-
shame/bucket.html)

~~~
irrational
Wow! But talk about a story that ended too soon. I want to hear about
repercussions for the restaurant!

------
macintux
I recall a dinner party where a few people were discussing the web, probably
1994. Essentially we all agreed the web was unusable because it was too hard
to find what you were looking for; the best ideas we had for solving that
problem were pretty bad.

Google changed the world. What used to be buried on the 3rd or 4th page of
Altavista results, if it appeared at all, was suddenly front and center.
(Yahoo’s directory was rarely useful at all.)

I’m not a fan of Google today, but for years I would tell everyone I knew
about it.

(Edit: fixed the year.)

~~~
wil421
Do you think Google is the new AOL? Way back AOL had their homepage where you
saw an AOL recommended part of the web. You still had access to the web but
for most first time users it was easier to use than a web browser alone.

I say this because I’ve been wondering if we now have a Google snapshot of the
web instead of AOLs homepage. Don’t get me wrong search is much better than a
more or less static homepage of topics.

Are we all in a Google search bubble?

~~~
ocdtrekkie
One of those "Google is the new AOL" moments hit me when I heard a commercial
for Google on the radio recently. Specifically, it was someone explaining that
they had a feature built especially for veterans to find jobs relevant to
them, and that you could get to it by typing "jobs for veterans" into Google
search.

It just sounded so much like the old AOL Keyword feature, which a lot of
people forgot about, but was literally often advertised on TV or radio as how
to get to a given site or web feature.

~~~
bwb
I do not understand how you guys can call Google the new AOL, Google search
works like a charm at a huge scale. What is the problem?

~~~
DylanBohlender
I think the crux of the others’ point is that Google’s increasingly complex
secret sauce for returning search results, combined with its general ubiquity,
has perhaps created a monoculture whereby we view the Web almost entirely
through Google’s lens. AOL’s “curation” of the web via its portal was a bit
more direct for sure, but I can see how the effect could be similar.

~~~
mda
Oh believe me you can find all sorts of non curated filth as well using Google
as well. I think it is still a pretty good engine for "if you insist, here is
the path to rabbit hole". If you let google know about you, it will tune the
results for you. I keep my history for this reason.

------
rusk
Altavista were also the first ones doing online translation.

babelfish.altavista.com, anyone remember that?

The Babelfish being Douglas Adams' fictional fish that you stuck in your ear
to use as a universal translator.

there was also a fake domain called alta-vista.com that was very much of the
goatse variety.

~~~
stevekemp
There was also astalavista which hosted crackz, key-generators, and similar
things.

The name always amused me, partly as a homage to the Terminator franchise, and
partly Altavista.

~~~
0xcoffee
And they had an amazing forum, I remember learning Photoshop there and reverse
engineering with a group called FFF (Does anything remember a guy with the mr
clean profile pic, Mr. X i think..?). Then they decided to redesign the forum
and everyone left.

------
adsadadsad
Altavisa and astalavista for years! Astalavista was for your all your serialz,
crackz and porn passwords back in the day of http basic auth and 56.6k modems

~~~
sucrose
Astalavista! Reminds me of warez listings and downloading Photoshop for days.

~~~
pwython
The popups. Oh god the popups.

------
Thoreandan
... and in 2019 the "digital.com" domain is apparently hosted by a site that
can't handle the traffic of this article. SPECIAL BONUS: Their current
robots.txt appears to be blocking the old Digital.com pages from the WayBack
machine. Argh.

~~~
fencepost
The Internet Archive stopped honoring robots.txt back in 2017 because
"Robots.txt meant for search engines don’t work well for web archives"

Not sure without a bit more digging whether they honor explicit rules for
their crawler.

Edit: (but a little looking at comments indicates that they don't, and notes
that ia_archiver is Alexa, not the Internet Archive)

~~~
Thoreandan
Hmmm, and their robots.txt seems to not be at fault. I wonder if they excluded
it to not overlap with Alta Vista, still it's tragic that digital.com isn't
browsable in the wayback machine.

~~~
fencepost
This may be a question of age. DEC was acquired by Compaq in 1998, then the IA
was only a couple years old.

------
gojomo
As I vaguely recall, from my own perceptions as web search was arriving:

* There were a bunch of early "full-text"-ish search experiments, but Lycos best proved its immense value and potential first.

* Then, AltaVista arrived with breadth & speed beyond what had previously been possible. Still, it required a bit of expertise to craft your queries.

* Then, Excite burst ahead with a _quality_ breakthrough. Something about their use of HTML-styling & in-link text meant that even with fewer sites, the results were much better.

* Then, Hotbot (powered by Inktomi) had an era of best mix of fresh-content, deep-content, and quality ranking.

* Then, all those pioneers dropped the ball, in one way or another, letting Google out-rank, out-crawl, and out-business-model them. (And much of Google's business-model was pioneered by "Goto", later "Overture".) Sad, really, especially how many coulda-shoulda competitors eventually died inside Yahoo. (Including Overture.)

~~~
dougb5
This is right on. To add some color from my memory as a Lycos employee, it
felt that many of the early search engines dropped by the ball in their rush
become "portals". There was this mass delusion that it was important to hold
the user's attention as long as possible in order to serve more ads--to own or
otherwise control the content that users ultimately ended up at. Web search
itself was seen as a commodity. This didn't seem so obviously wrong at the
time. The Web was so much smaller.

~~~
sytelus
I had say 2000 buble bursting also played part. It was easier to survive for a
nimble startup and hard for behemoth with huge employee count and little
revenues. I wonder if that didn’t happened then if we would have more
competition in this space.

------
erikig
"...AltaVista was essentially a test case for one of Digital’s supercomputers,
the AlphaServer 8400 TurboLaser."

I loved the seeming technical excesses of Digital so much. Nothing they did
seemed as calm and staid as Cray, Sun or even SGI.

Think about that name - _Alpha Server 8400 Turbo Laser_

~~~
Nelson69
The "8400" part almost seems arbitrary to the rest of the name

~~~
asdff
Everyone still names their crap like this. "Dell Optiplex 7010" or "Nvidia
GeForce GTX 1060 GTI RTX ETC ETC" gives me absolutely zero information about
the product other than what to google.

------
siggen
If I remember correctly, Altavista produced better results than Google back
then, for me at least. However, Altavista took seconds to load the first page
(on 56k) whereas Google's first page loaded almost immediately.

I honestly didn't expect Google to have survived the dot-com bust back then.
This was before they figured out online adword auctions.

~~~
baldfat
Google was immediately better then anything else from day one. Google was
launched in Fall of 1997. In January 98 is when I started using it and it was
hands down better then crawlers or any other search engine.

~~~
siggen
I fear all we have now is anecdotal evidence. :-) In my case, it was a gradual
conversion to Google from Altavista than something immediate.

So, funny thing: Back then, if one search engine didn't have what you were
looking for, you would try another. Now, if Google doesn't have what you are
looking for, where do you go? Does it mean the answer does not exist on the
Internet? Do you try Bing or Duck?

~~~
steelframe
Duck is Bing.

[https://www.quora.com/How-is-the-Bing-API-used-by-
DuckDuckGo](https://www.quora.com/How-is-the-Bing-API-used-by-DuckDuckGo)

There are effectively only two competitive search engines in the U.S. and
European markets today. In those markets, Bing is the only market pressure
keeping Google honest.

~~~
scarmig
DDG is just a whitelabeled Bing? That's interesting.

~~~
kinkrtyavimoodh
There are only three major worldwide English language indexes—Google, Bing and
Yandex. For all the praise DDG gets here, it couldn't exist without Bing.

------
xedarius
I remember having ‘a go on the Internet’ round my friends house in the early
nineties. He said go on type anything you want to know about.

So I searched for ‘Amiga games’. It came back with a screen full of junk.

I looked at my friend and said ‘none of this has anything to do with Amiga
games’.

He said no you need to ‘+computer’ ‘-Spanish’.

I said to him, ‘who’s crappy idea was this?’

Needless to say we all got better at booolean searches and Altavista was light
years ahead of yahoo.

Google was a welcome change, made the internet a cool place for about 10
years.

------
m-p-3
The website seems to be struggling, I pinned it on my IPFS node using
2read.net

[https://ipfs.io/ipfs/QmQXeXmMMVfPL9Syqgkoo8zLf6noGrSnGFbnetL...](https://ipfs.io/ipfs/QmQXeXmMMVfPL9Syqgkoo8zLf6noGrSnGFbnetLHT2o79H)

If other IPFS users wants to pin that to distribute the load, that'd be great.

~~~
jgalt212
thanks, worked for me.

------
pmlnr
> On its launch day in 1995, the new search engine saw around 300,000
> visitors. One year later in 1996, it was serving 19 million visitors each
> day.

> (hardware) up to: 12 64bit 350MHz processor, 14GB RAM, 39TB storage

220 hits/s dynamic content on that is _very_ impressive.

------
Isamu
The main reason I started using Altavista was because it was faster. I don't
know why this wasn't mentioned in the article, it was one of main points of
the Altavista architecture.

We probably can't appreciate it because Google is truly FAST and we are
spoiled by it. But the alternative search engines were slow, slow, slow.

------
sct202
I remember having to use all those meta search engines that combined the
results of several engines together to average out all the trash of each
result set, and then Google appeared and was better than that.

~~~
rco8786
Dogpile!

Makes you wonder about stuff like Kayak today in the travel space. Is there
some better way out there waiting to be found?

~~~
npmaile
sadly enough the answer here is also google. flights.google.com
hotels.google.com

------
RoutinePlayer
Vividly remember why AltaVista failed -- they monetized way TOO QUICKLY.
Everyone was griping about its sluggishness. Then a few months later a friend
pointed me to this new google.com thingy, with its minimalist page, and no
ads!

------
usr1106
The link repeatedly gives me nothing but

403 Forbidden

You don't have permission to access /about/altavista/ on this server.

~~~
lostgame
Likewise. Since this was live.

~~~
usr1106
Ah, could it be that his site is one of the crazy American sites that deny
readers from the EU access because of GDPR? I am in the EU.

Well, I don't think this article is worth finding out.

~~~
vivekd
Canadian here, I'm blocked as well and we don't have GDPR

------
woliveirajr
Altavista was a great showcase on how powerfull servers and internet were at
that era: before it, internet was considered something that needed Yellow
Pages to be viable. With altavista the content gained relevance over the
location, suddenly you didn't need to know where to find it, knowing what you
wanted was enought.

Google was a big step afterwards, showing that even when you know what you
want, you might not express it correctly, so having some ranking on results
was helpful.

------
athenot
Altavista was my favorite search engine before Google. Being able to put in a
query (which could have logical expressions) instead of a directory of links
was awesome!

------
not2b
The approach that Altavista took didn't scale with web growth. It was based on
the idea of database searching, where the engine was supposed to return all
pages that matched a query. This meant that you couldn't expect to type a
generic term and get a useful result; you'd be overwhelmed with random pages.
You could find pages that contained an exact phrase, and this could be useful
for finding out what some error message means. But as the web exploded in
size, the results you could easily get from Altavista got worse and worse; you
could fight by adding more and more qualifiers to filter out what you didn't
want, but junk results were mixed in with good results.

That's why Yahoo had a business: search engines were of limited use pre-
Google, so you needed a hand-curated list to find the good stuff on the web.

Google was first to figure out an effective algorithm to rank results by
quality. People immediately stepped in to try to game the system with link
farms, junk tags and the like, but even so, it was a revolution.

------
mtmail
Starting 2005 both altavista and
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AlltheWeb](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AlltheWeb)
were just frontend templates and CSS stylesheets around the Yahoo search, even
ran on the same servers. I'm surprised Yahoo kept the separate brands live
until 2011.

------
i_am_nomad
"Yahoo closed AltaVista quietly in 2013."

Wow - what must have it been like to work on/for AltaVista in late 2012? Seems
like a kind of extreme professional exile at that point.

------
dictum
A case of Baader-Meinhof today: I was reading about AltaVista an hour or so
before this was posted. (Hyperlink trail: DARPA's Memex -> Memex -> Paul
Flaherty)

------
intsunny
Not mentioned in this article, there was an attempt to reboot Altavista into a
Google competitor: raging.com

[https://www.geek.com/news/altavista-is-
raging-565120/](https://www.geek.com/news/altavista-is-raging-565120/)

------
gp2000
Although it is a historical (and disavowed) footnote, the Open Text Index
launched in April 1995 and sported full text indexing of web pages -- more
than 6 months before Alta Vista's launch in December that year.

It did serve as a back-end search for Yahoo! though it never could keep up
with the full query volume. It was lambasted by the creators of Google for
experimenting with putting clearly-marked ads in search results. That
transgression looks hilariously quaint to modern eyes.

[https://www.referenceforbusiness.com/history2/72/Open-
Text-C...](https://www.referenceforbusiness.com/history2/72/Open-Text-
Corporation.html)

------
pointillistic
When David Wetherell, of CMGI fame, bought Alta Vista and was driving it to
the IPO, I remember telling him urgently that Google was eating AV lunch. He
just brushed me off, as if I was telling him nonsense. Same fate with Lycos
and if you will Yahoo.

------
JohnFen
I have to admit there are times when I miss Altvista, particularly since the
quality of Google's search results has plummeted for me to the point where DDG
is at least equally good.

I really, really miss those boolean operators.

------
fbnbr
Anyone else getting “You don't have permission to access /about/altavista/ on
this server.” ?

~~~
spydum
Didn’t you hear? They stopped updating their indexes.

/s

------
raiyu
I think the main takeaway from this is really conception. There was a problem
that a team set about to solve. They were left on their own to operate because
solving search wasn't really what the company was interested in, as much as
showing how powerful their computers were.

Left to their own devices Altavista became a successful search engine because
it was able to focus on what users really wanted from search and do tremendous
pioneering in that area.

It was my default search engine of choice before google gained steam.

However, from there, once value was created corporate entities began to try
and extract more value. Now the user was no longer front and center, and
unless the business decisions coincided with what the user wanted you would
obviously begin to move the product further and further away from it's core
user benefits.

This is a very typical processes in most businesses. Businesses till think
that their needs come first, rather than their customers/users. This happens
so frequently that it really is a just insane that no one addresses it.
Eventually those business people get enough things wrong that they are left no
choice but to return to the core of what made them successful and just hope
that the market hasn't moved away to a competitor.

In Altavista's case the market had already shifted.

Doesn't matter how many books you write on this subject this continues to
occur and really highlights the need for a strong product focused CEO so that
they can ensure that the customer comes first and the business second.

------
cromulent
Lycos is still running.

[https://www.lycos.com](https://www.lycos.com)

------
akirby
DEC was based in Maynard, MA not CA. We had a couple excellent teams in the
Bay area that were acquired from Xerox as I recall. The Systems Research
Center in Palo Alto and WRL.

AltaVista was not the only business that DEC failed to capitalize on. We had
an $800M networking business when Cisco was just starting. DEC defunded that
business to invest more in other projects. We had a storage server business
that we sold to a little company call EMC too. It's quite sad...

~~~
sytelus
Number of things DEC missed out on: personal computer, DOS, search engine,
networking, storage.

How can something having so much lead keep missing out on so big? What they
could have done differently?

------
joelberman
DEC wanted to sell Alphaservers (and VMS). Altavista was a great demonstration
of scale and speed and distributed computing (versus a giant mainframe).
Crawling and indexing speed. Tons of open ip connections, security,etc were
all selling points. Bring large customers to see the physical Altavista and
also the ip exchange helped sell lots of systems. DEC was a hardware company.
Google wasn’t. Made a lot of difference in priorities.

~~~
sytelus
So DEC missed out on IBM PC revolution, Microsoft DOS and now search engines!

------
crispytx
I use to be an Altavista user. In Middle School one of my teachers showed us
Google in the computer lab and I've been using it ever since. What I remember
standing out at the time was Google's UI; it was just a logo, a text input,
and two buttons. I thought that was neat and just kept using it after that.
The search results may have been better, but that wasn't why I made the
switch.

------
auslander
Forbidden

You don't have permission to access /about/altavista/ on this server.

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bad_user
I remember being in an Internet Cafe, being as always frustrated by not being
able to find anything for my search on both Altavista and Yahoo. Back then
Altavista was my primary search engine, but I hated it.

The I saw “Google” loaded on another computer and decided to try it out. The
difference in quality was overwhelming, in that first session it made me smile
and made an instant convert out of me.

Another difference is that Google did not have any ads initially, and when
they finally added ads, they were clearly highlighting them as ads, instead of
masking them as regular search results. And overall their interface was really
clean compared with their competition.

I don’t know if it was my search patterns, maybe other people had a different
experience, but the difference was night and day.

Even today, I may whine and moan about Google, but their Search is still the
best and I’m saying this as a DuckDuckGo user.

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xivzgrev
I like reading this comment thread on why google may have been superior to
altavista. It gives a more “adult” perspective on something I remember as a
kid.

I was in middle or high school, and remember using several different search
engines: altavista, lycos, yahoo, dogpile, etc. they all were bulky portals
and search results probably weren’t great (that’s why I used so many).

Then one day a friend said “hey have you used google?” I said no, and he
showed me.

-it was clean/simple

-the search page (and results) loaded really fast

-the search results must’ve been better as well

-I remember I liked the quirkiness of it too. It felt fun to use Google

From that day on I only remember using Google, until recently given their
size, been using Duck Duck Go more often. It’s pretty good for regular search
(though maybe 10% queries return some less relevant results than Google) but
product search still has a long way to go.

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dougb
I'd like to see the source code for Altavista released to the Computer History
Museum. I think it is of historical significance. If anyone knows who
currently has that code, please post a comment. I think there is a lot to
learn from examining old computer code.

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jcims
I still use 'ping av.com' as a quick test for internet connectivity. Still
works even though it's seemingly owned by a Chinese company now.

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freediver
I am in the 'ping ibm.com' camp

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webwanderings
ping yahoo.com

Old habits die hard.

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quickthrower2
Im a ping 1.1.1.1 guy. Fast to type.

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irrational
For some reason I don't recall using Altavista very much. I was aware of it,
but I remember using AskJeeves and Yahoo search much more.

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glaberficken
As a European early adopter I still remember the day i switched from
recommending Altavista to all my friends and family to Google. Speed was
definitely not the reason. It was purely about the usefulness of the results.
There was just a point in time where Google surpassed everyone else in
relevance of the 1st page of results, and there was no going back.

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sytelus
Do you remember the year this happened for you?

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cromat3
Google cached version of site:
[https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:i-IE6l...](https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:i-IE6lZl8LIJ:https://digital.com/about/altavista/+&cd=1&hl=hr&ct=clnk&gl=hr&client=opera)

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showdead
I remember getting a free polo shirt with the AltaVista logo embroidered on
it. I don't recall the specific circumstances that led to being sent a shirt,
and I wore holes in it so I no longer have it, but it really was superior to
the alternatives before Google came along.

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Gitnumb
Domain related. Digital.com later sold, AV.com sold. Premium domains
everywhere.

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ofrzeta
Ca. 1996 we implemented ad blocking Altavista in our corporate net through DNS
rewrites because the ads were already annoying back then. Comparatively small
but also with comparatively low bandwidth.

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baxtr
I still remember exactly the day a friend of mine called me, saying: “There is
this new search engine, it’s so much cleaner than Altavista, and better, it
jus has a strange name: google”

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6c696e7578
What I miss is how well it rendered on mobile phones. My handset is pretty
old, the relatively lightweight page was a pleasure to use.

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CapitalistCartr
Alta Vista was great. The skill was in the user, yhough, not the algorithm.
Construct searches like:

(word AND word) NEAR (word OR word)

and it worked great.

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fareesh
I used to use something called webcrawler as a kid. Was it a search engine or
just a meta-search engine?

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srhngpr
I even used the free dial-up (ad-supported) internet that Altavista provided
back in the day!

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mycall
I preferred allinone.com instead. Comedy to see different iframes of search
knowledge.

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jcmoscon
I remember that they payed $3 million dollars for the altavista.com domain.

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known
Prior to Google I liked infind.com meta-search

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drxzcl
pizza "deep dish" +Chicago

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crypto_guide
Before Google, companies operated like a government office. I suppose, Google
brought in a shift in thinking of internet companies.

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ngcc_hk
No permission to access ...

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saltyshake
same thing

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crypto_guide
Anyone remember hotbot?

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ArrayList
I miss HotBot. Anyone remember that?

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UncleSlacky
That was probably the best single engine before Google. Around the same time,
I also used the meta-search site dogpile.com - which still exists.

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smileypete
Surprised no-one has mentioned metacrawler so far:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MetaCrawler](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MetaCrawler)

