
A Eulogy For AltaVista, The Google Of Its Time - gregosaur
http://searchengineland.com/altavista-eulogy-165366
======
joshuak
I 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)

~~~
altcognito
In 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
Really? 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
That'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.

------
rsync
I 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
You 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
Just out of curiosity why is search text actually occurring in the page body
an 'advanced' feature?

~~~
PavlovsCat
Because there are many factors taken into consideration by default, like
anchor text of links to a page or the URL.

~~~
joshuak
Well 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.

------
PommeDeTerre
Maybe 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
AltaVista has been a front-end for Yahoo search for >10 years... Not a lot of
source code left...

~~~
PommeDeTerre
Is this just speculation? Or do you have first-hand experience at Yahoo!, or
something to that effect, to back up this claim?

~~~
mcintyre1994
No 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=A0oG7pc8zNBRgwMAFJel8...](http://us.yhs4.search.yahoo.com/r/_ylt=A0oG7pc8zNBRgwMAFJel87UF/SIG=11unuvm0e/EXP=1372667068/**http%3a//us.yhs4.search.yahoo.com/yhs/search)

Note that the action on the yahoo.com (US) search form is:
[http://search.yahoo.com/search;_ylt=AkYpzVmc8WkqPKbMSU46mpqb...](http://search.yahoo.com/search;_ylt=AkYpzVmc8WkqPKbMSU46mpqbvZx4)

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
I'm not disputing that there may be very little to modern AltaVista. But
that's not really what I was originally referring to, either.

I'm not sure about Yahoo!'s policies, but most other large companies or
organizations with custom software have processes in place to ensure the
archival of old source code.

In these kinds of organizations, it's quite typical to have source code going
back many years, if not many decades, for each release of a given software
product.

This has gotten even easier as source control has become more widely used,
especially during the 1980s and later, and as storage space has gotten far
cheaper and larger. Many development groups have put great effort into
ensuring that entire histories have been preserved when moving between version
control systems, even when several such transitions have taken place. It can
sometimes be possible to see change sets committed back in the 1980s, for
instance.

Again, while I don't have any first-hand experience there, I'd be very
surprised if Yahoo! did not have at least some of the early AltaVista source
code archived in some way.

------
Zigurd
It 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.

~~~
rodgerd
Honestly, 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
Very 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.

------
ChuckMcM
I 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.

------
_delirium
babelfish.altavista.com was also the translate.google.com of its time

~~~
jahmed
Ahhh babelfish. So many poorly translated high school spanish papers.

------
INTPenis
I remember the dark side, astalavista. My entry into the world of exploratory
computing. ;)

------
drallison
Altavista'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.

------
xedarius
I 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.

------
whiddershins
I 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.

------
dm8
I 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.

------
henrikschroder
I 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...

------
felixfurtak
If my memory serves me AltaVista had good newsgroup support too. It was even
possible to manually uudecode binary files from the search results.

------
jmboling
Sadly, google was just easier to type.

