Yahoo pipes was ok when it worked, and could have been brilliant. I remember setting up a pipes page to filter the digg front page around the time when the last harry potter book was being released.
It worked well enough to keep me from getting spoiled, but I remember the rest of the experience was kind of miserable.
Even back in the day, I preferred Altavista. I have never perceived yahoo or any of their products as good, or used any regularly, other than a few that were acquired like Flickr.
yahoo was before Altavista. When they started a table of contents of the web it was great - back when the web was small enough that you could make a table of contents (at the time gopher was bigger than the web and growing faster, and gopher was mostly accessed via the table of contents). When Altavista came yahoo's index was better because instead of having to figure out the right search terms you could navigate a logical table of contents quickly. Then the web exploded (gopher was already all but dead) and it wasn't possible for yahoo to keep up, at which point search became the only hope.
If Altavista hadn't quit updating their index for several months, they could have killed google just by keeping their index up to date and continuously refining their search algorithm. Of course this last is speculation but it is reasonable, google wasn't that much better.
When I first saw Google I'd been using AltaVista almost exclusively because it allowed phrase searching and keyword exclusion. Google seemed primitive by comparison.
However, it was light and fast at a time when most of my access was via 64k lines or dial-up. AltaVista had become increasingly cluttered with GIF advertising and 'portal' nonsense.
AltaVista became slow and cumbersome, while Google was fast and clean. For me, that was AltaVista's downfall.
Yes, this. While I appreciated Google's relevancy for search it didn't blow me away that much -- the real special sauce that early-Google had was the extremely lightweight search page. At a time when Altavista, lycos, Yahoo, etc. were just piling on goop after goop onto their landing pages, Google did a really smart thing and disrupted the whole space with its very minimal style. Not even sure how deliberate that was, but it was a huge advantage.
I think it was deliberate, because when they did include advertising in search results, they innovated with text-only ads (and on an unobtrusive part of the page).
I recall that I grew to appreciate these ads - they were often relevant to what I was doing at that point in time. Much more civilised than the garish GIFs that were the norm at that time.
Well, Yahoo was founded in March 1995 and Altavista was opened in December 1995, which I think is generally the same time period.
My perception as a technical user at the time is different than yours -- Altavista was much more influential to me than the curated table of contents that Yahoo had.
You're talking about a very small window there, even if you focus on more than launch date. I remember Yahoo being the go to around 1995, and Altavista being the source for power results starting around 1997-99 or so. That's an iPhone 6s to iPhone 8 window of time.
