Why AltaVista Lost Ground To Google Sooner Than Expected 172
techtsp writes: Marcia J. Bates, UCLA Professor Emerita of Information Studies recently explained why Google's birth led to the downfall of AltaVista. According to Bates, early search engines including AltaVista adapted the classical IR methods. At the other hand, Google founders started off with a completely different approach in mind. Google successfully recognized the potential of URLs, which could be added to the algorithms for the sake of information indexing altogether. Google's modern age techniques were a huge boost to those older techniques. Whatever other business and company management issues AltaVista faced, it was the last of the old style information retrieval engines.
Link to quora post (Score:3, Informative)
https://www.quora.com/Why-did-Altavista-search-engine-lose-ground-so-quickly-to-Google/answer/Marcia-J-Bates [quora.com]
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Don't go there. It'll show you a taster then ask you to sign up. The first page is pretty innocuous. But the second asks for access to stuff no sane person would share with their lawyer or minister, who are bound to confidentiality, let alone some random website. So I said "fuck this for a game of cricket" and didn't complete the registration.
I still get 20 or so emails from them per day.
Re:Link to quora post (Score:5, Informative)
I got no such thing from the quora page (https://www.quora.com/Why-did-Altavista-search-engine-lose-ground-so-quickly-to-Google/answer/Marcia-J-Bates)
It doesn't even have a second page!
The link from TFS is to http://www.pc-tablet.co.in/ [pc-tablet.co.in], which is just as long as the original quora page, but it's reworded to the point of being useless.
For example, where the bastardized pc-tablet page says, "Google successfully recognized the potential of URLs", the original didn't use the word URL in the entire article. What they said was, "What the Google founders recognized about search on the Web was that information about LINKS could be added to the algorithms." See, that makes much more sense, and it's actually what google did! Link to your page from other pages significantly increased your page rank, even more so if those other pages were on topic. The URL of those other pages didn't matter, and they weren't extracting any additional information from the URL.
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I wasn't particularly clear, I was speaking in general based on a previous time. But this one puts a popup wanting to verify my email address and see who else I know. No thanks.
Perhaps you already signed up, or just click confirm without thinking about it?
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Wow, way to fuck that up (Score:5, Insightful)
The article says "URLs" when the Quora post, cited as the source, says LINKS. Also the article is basically devoid of any information, other than "Google did better because it used LINKS to help determine ranking." Thanks for the headline, with a summary, linking to an article that misquotes the linked source, that has a healine worth of information. No really, thanks.
How the hell did this get on the front page? (Score:3)
Firehose moderation picked this article? Editors allowed it in? or did Dice just take a big payoff?
Re:How the hell did this get on the front page? (Score:5, Insightful)
Editors? you must be new here.
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It's a meta-story. On the face of it, it's about AltaVista and Google, but in reality it's about the speed that articles of the day get onto slashdot.
This one measures about 10 years - up on last year, but still down on the overall trend ;-)
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What Do You Expect? (Score:5, Informative)
The article says "URLs" when the Quora post, cited as the source, says LINKS. Also the article is basically devoid of any information, other than "Google did better because it used LINKS to help determine ranking." Thanks for the headline, with a summary, linking to an article that misquotes the linked source, that has a healine worth of information. No really, thanks.
It's a paid-for "article" to a ad-infested link-farm.
Here's a link to the ACTUAL story: https://www.quora.com/Why-did-... [quora.com]
Citation index (Score:5, Informative)
There's a thing called the science citation index that sorts papers that are referenced more to a higher score than those that are not referenced much, and it's a good way to find those papers on a topic that others have found most useful.
Google saw it worked and applied a similar method using links (as the above poster wrote). That method brought human judgment that had already been applied into the mix and enabled them to index far more rapidly than AltaVista with better results than AltaVista's simple keyword searches. It was more likely to lead people to a key site that many used instead of an abandoned fan site.
That's the main difference.
And fast! (Score:2)
It is hard to imagine now, but in those days "surfing" included a good deal of waiting, because of slower connections and probably slower servers. I remember Altavista being significantly faster than e.g. Yahoo search, and Google being faster than Altavista, most likely because the two academics that started it had a more sober web site.
Re:And fast! (Score:4, Informative)
The 'fast' thing really can't be overstated. By the time Google launched, AltaVista's search page had become huge, to the extent that it took about 30 seconds to load on a 28.8Kb/s MODEM (the fastest that mine could connect at given the line quality, though on paper it could do 56Kb/s). Google took well under 5 seconds (not because Google devs were clever and actively aimed for this, quite the reverse: they didn't initially have anyone good at HTML/CSS stuff, so produced the simplest page that worked).
I remember the search results on Google being worse than AltaVista, but getting them so much faster that I could start loading the first 3-4 before AltaVista showed me anything. Occasionally I'd go back to AltaVista if Google failed. A few years later, Google fucked up their UI enough to make me switch to DuckDuckGo.
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This is not true. I've worked in the Search Engine space since 1995, and at all times Google's result were superior to Altavista. Not only was the Google ranking algorithm superior, the Altavista crawl fell way behind the Google crawl, so often the page you were looking for wasn't even in the Altavista index.
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at all times Google's result were superior to Altavista
That's a highly subjective judgement and likely to depend a lot on the search terms. Most of the time, either both or neither found what I was looking for. Towards the end, AltaVista largely succumbed to spam, but around 2000 there wasn't much in it.
Not only was the Google ranking algorithm superior, the Altavista crawl fell way behind the Google crawl, so often the page you were looking for wasn't even in the Altavista index.
Until Google moved away from MapReduce, their results also lagged a long time behind. Searching for anything in today's news wouldn't find any relevant results with Google until long after AltaVista's demise.
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That's a highly subjective judgement and likely to depend a lot on the search terms.
Yes, still it is done all the time, and quite effectively. For example, I can search for "TheRaven64" and either I should get your homepage or a very explainable alternate result e.g. your homepage is hidden behind "TheRaven64" Hollywood movie.
We had lots of tests like that, and Google would produce the "right answer" (TM) among the top 3 while Altavista often had the correct answer in position 30 or 40.
Until Google moved away from MapReduce, their results also lagged a long time behind.
Both were laggy, but again there are searches that help you determine the size of the crawl e.g. search f
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The 'fast' thing really can't be overstated. By the time Google launched, AltaVista's search page had become huge, to the extent that it took about 30 seconds to load on a 28.8Kb/s MODEM (the fastest that mine could connect at given the line quality, though on paper it could do 56Kb/s). Google took well under 5 seconds (not because Google devs were clever and actively aimed for this, quite the reverse: they didn't initially have anyone good at HTML/CSS stuff, so produced the simplest page that worked).
I remember the search results on Google being worse than AltaVista, but getting them so much faster that I could start loading the first 3-4 before AltaVista showed me anything. Occasionally I'd go back to AltaVista if Google failed. A few years later, Google fucked up their UI enough to make me switch to DuckDuckGo.
The problem with DuckDuckGo is that it doesn't take into account location. When I search ABC from Perth, Western Australia I want to get the Australian Broadcasting Corporations website, not the American commercial channel. DDG always directs me to the latter, same with anything that has an international presence, if I want citibank.com.au with DDG, I have to search Citibank Australia. I know DDG is meant to prevent tracking, but I dont really care if Darth Brin and Page know I get my news from the ABC and
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Re:Wow, way to fuck that up (Score:5, Informative)
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Google was a double-edged sword. It did give more relevant search results, compared to the competitors of the time (Yahoo, Lycos, hell, archie even.) For example, if I wanted to look up "part" as a keyword, most search engines would return stuff like "compartment", "apartment", or pages with that word returned. It would take building SQL queries "this AND this OR this NOT (this or this)" in order to find usable results. With Google and its ability to use links, it had a far better tendency to find stuff
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As the content of sidebars and adverts mainly come from 'external' sources, one way to counter this problem would be to have an option to only search on the actual page and not in any included content. So that if the only match to the search is in an advert on a page, that page would not be included in the search results but the page to which you would be directed if you clicked on the advert would be included (only once and not generate hits for every other page carrying the advert)
Re:Wow, way to fuck that up (Score:5, Interesting)
But it was quite easy to game the system. To begin with, if you wanted to be #1 for "SEX" you would just repeat the word "SEX" a lot of times. It was all done on in-page factors. Of course, AltaVista engineers eventually tried to counteract the spam (use a word too many times and it counts against you, for example), but the whole PageRank idea did lead to better results.
I seem to remember that AltaVista was originally a project to show how powerful DEC's Alpha processors were. Instead, it opened up the idea that the whole web (or at least millions of pages) could be searchable on a full-text basis. That was pretty revolutionary at the time.
Grammar? (Score:4, Insightful)
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Everyone knows there's only one definition of IR.
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Let us call this story a shit post. As likely to be generated by a bot as an idiot.
The only confusing thing is how it got picked.
Slashdot's decline continues.
Different Times. (Score:2)
Altavista was popular for a small web. Once it got big we needed a better tool.
Now us tech guys oddly enough who seems to be in charge of state of the art technology are very reluctant to changes. So Altavista didn't change fast enough for the newer larger web.
Google when it came out it was for a larger web, and was designed for the larger web. And what made it stay, was the fact that they weren't afraid to give us die hard techies the middle finger and make a lot of upgrades, however they did it in a way
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I was a regular user of Altavista until a coworker pointed out that this new search engine "Google" was much better for finding academic papers. At that time, Google was excellent for academic papers, but useless for most other things.
Different Times Indeed. (Score:3)
...a coworker pointed out that this new search engine "Google" was much better for finding academic papers. At that time, Google was excellent for academic papers, but useless for most other things.
My how times have changed. Not that I can obtain academic papers without paying through the ... nose ... anyway.
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I was a regular user of AltaVista because I had learned how to use the query language to narrow down the results to those of interest to me.
I stopped using AltaVista and started using Google when AltaVista started returning pages of broken links.
For me the reason that AltaVista failed was that it web indexing could not keep up.
More search, less portal (Score:3)
From my recollection it was because it did away the mess of the portal concept, did away with intrusive ads and focused on search. It was simple and effective. Everything else was a marketer's wet dream, but a mess for anyone else.
I am sure people who used the net back then can confirm that it was the simplicity and elegance of Google that gave it the advantage. I certainly switched because of that.
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Really? Google still has it's search page, perhaps you're referring to the banner up top? Atavist still has News, Weather and Trending Searches although it's a lot simpler than 2000's altavista.com: http://images.sixrevisions.com... [sixrevisions.com]
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Altavista had some good features until Yahoo took over. Like the "NEAR" keyword and similar stuff for advanced searches. When Yahoo took over they killed a decent search engine and replaced it with their own that isn't any good for anything.
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Google was designed for the larger-than-Altavista web, but the web is now too big for Google. I saw the oversized-internet problem first when teaching English overseas. Whereas in 2007 I could find a prewritten lesson on most topics within about 10-20 minutes on Google, in 2012, the game was generally a bust as I could spend an hour filtering through dozens of irrelevant lessons (due to people using far too many tags) and hundreds of variations on the same theme. The lesson sites by then were flooded with i
Infra-Red vs Links! (Score:5, Funny)
Providing links to search results was obviously far more useful to web users than Infrared.
Duh.
Plagiarize much? (Score:5, Informative)
First paragraph at Wikipedia [wikipedia.org]: "AltaVista was an early web search engine founded in 1995. It was once one of the most popular search engines, but it lost ground to Google and was purchased by Yahoo! in 2003, which retained the brand but based all AltaVista searches on its own search engine. On July 8, 2013, the service was shut down by Yahoo! and since then, the domain redirects to Yahoo!'s own search site.[2]"
Second and third lines of TFA: "Founded in 1995, AltaVista was a very popular Internet search engine website. Nevertheless, AltaVista lost ground to Google and was purchased by Yahoo! in 2003. Ten years later, Yahoo! officially shut down AltaVista in July 2013 and redirected the domain name to its own search engine website."
Hmm...
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At one time Altavista was preparing the legal paperwork for an IPO.
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First paragraph at Wikipedia [wikipedia.org]: "AltaVista was an early web search engine founded in 1995. It was once one of the most popular search engines, but it lost ground to Google and was purchased by Yahoo! in 2003, which retained the brand but based all AltaVista searches on its own search engine. On July 8, 2013, the service was shut down by Yahoo! and since then, the domain redirects to Yahoo!'s own search site.[2]"
Second and third lines of TFA: "Founded in 1995, AltaVista was a very popular Internet search engine website. Nevertheless, AltaVista lost ground to Google and was purchased by Yahoo! in 2003. Ten years later, Yahoo! officially shut down AltaVista in July 2013 and redirected the domain name to its own search engine website."
Hmm...
LOL, nice catch.
Paid placement (Score:5, Informative)
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For a while AltaVista was for sure the most relevant search engine. Like all the others, they evolved by chasing the easiest dollar. Front page ads, paid for results, etc. Small minded stuff.
Google on the other hand took the long view, they kept the front page clean, kept the search results pure, and kept the advertising in check.
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Yup, it had the best advanced search (remember the near option?) in its day.
Mind you, that day was back in the dial-up era. It turned into a portal and went shit at exactly the wrong time, and google snatched the opportunity.
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I kind of miss the old catalog style of Yahoo. In a smaller web it was sometimes useful to find a listing of web sites categorized by topic.
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One way around that - or to get better results was to actually write good search queries. Altavista had the "NEAR" keyword which helped a lot to get relevant results.
Not everything that makes a search result ranking higher had to do with paid results either - sometimes it was done by other means to increase page ranks.
Relevancy via references instead of text (Score:2)
Instead of ranking relevancy by hits of a word inside the document, which was how it was done before, google ranked relevancy by references to the content.
Note that most in-house wikis still rank things the old way, which is why most search results from your internal wiki suck. Even google's custom search on your internet page sucks...because without humans performing relevancy ranking via links google is just as bad as the old stuff.
The interface had something to do with it (Score:3, Insightful)
By the time Altavista got popular, the interface was a cluttered mess where you could hardly find the search line. Google came with an almost empty screen with a logo and a search line. You'd have switched just to save your eyes. More like the good old Webcrawler interface.
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I tried to use altavista as long as I could, but in the end, the cluttered mess it became as time passed made me switch to google and when I switched, google was as good or better than altavista
The AltaVista Page Sucked (Score:4, Informative)
Altavista had better results than Google for years, especially because you could use all sorts of search modifiers that Google didn't support till later like -no_pages_with_this_word or +must +have +all +these and logical operators.
But then as the leaders they got cocky and wanted to be a portal and filled up the page with so much crap and spam it hurt. Meanwhile Google's page was still just search box, go, I'm feeling lucky, and a few other tiny things.
That's why I switched after Google got good enough that they were comparable, NOT better. It was just less annoying. That's why most of the people I knew back then switched.
AltaVista realized too late what they'd done and tried to rebrand as 'Raging' with just a simple search page, but by then it was too late.
I'm sure the Google approach is much more scaleable but the article seems terribly confused and like it's trying to make some bizarre sense out of a cultural artifact from a time they can't comprehend.
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Google added features like searching with "site:ibm.com" so you only searched one site for results. Google also added natural language processing so people could ask it questions and it would find the answers to the questions. Ask Jeeves had that first, but Google did a better version of it.
One thing that Google did was Adsense and advertising and I don't recall Altavista and others having advertising options, but they did have sponsored listings. Google found a way for web masters to earn money. Google bec
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That's why I switched after Google got good enough that they were comparable, NOT better. It was just less annoying.
My experience was completely different. Google gave me much better results, pretty much every time. I never really saw the crap-laden Altavista because by then I'd completely switched.
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It was because of AstaLavista (Score:5, Funny)
not google that cause AltaVista to fail.
A problem with many of the other SE (Score:2)
Alta Vista adopted paid search entries (Score:3)
Fark Alta Vista, I'm glad you're dead and buried.
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Yahoo was the first search engine. In '92-93 it was just a list of sites sent by email. Altavista was the Google of its time, it gave the best results by far and supported all sorts of regex-style operators for great searches. You could even find password lists and security holes if you searched the right way. Google was great because its page was clean and didn't take 60 seconds to load, like Altavista became. The "best search results" thing came later.
You've got a bad memory, pal. Also, you can sa
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AltaVista was thee search engine in it's time. Around the time Google come out, the search results on AltaVista become heavily dominated with paid sites. You use to be able to find what you wanted within the first few hits on Altavista. Then, it started taking 2 to 3 pages of search results to find what you were looking for. Often, those 2 to 3 pages included repeated links to the same paid sites.
Google brought back the magic of being able to find what you wanted. Not pages and pages of paid links.
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Portal (Score:2)
Alta Vista decided to go the portal route, with a bunch of crap on the search page. Google came out with a simple look, with only the keyword field.
https://web.archive.org/web/19981202230410/http://www.google.com/
vs.
https://web.archive.org/web/19990125093146/http://www.altavista.com/
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Google search algorithm 2015 (Score:2)
Hit 1: Wikipedia entry.
Hit 2...n: Random URLs.
What about the full-text search factor? (Score:2)
Though much has made about "the potential of URLs" for searching, aka PageRank [wikipedia.org], my own experience as someone who used AltaVista up to the moment he discovered Google was that Google was the first full-text web search engine - or at least the first one I experienced.
Prior to Google, all the search engines simply indexed extracts of pages, primarily meta-data such as a page's own description of itself. That led to frequent disconnects between the preview content provided by the search engine and the actual c
Alta Vista was not supposed to make money (Score:5, Interesting)
It was a technology demonstration of DEC's (remember Digital Equipment? If so you are old!) new Alpha chips and servers, so powerful that they could index the entire early 1990s web. A very minor side project.
When Compaq bought DEC, they were surprised to find that they had also bought Alta Vista. Around then somebody tried to commercialize it and killed it in the process.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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yep, finally someone else remembers!
Just as Microsoft had their terraserver, but couldn't see a viable internet mapping application, Digital had their internet search, but couldn't see a business built around search.
Google exists because the competition didn't even know what they had.
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The funny thing is that Altavista and a lot of other sites back then did all this (thousand-millions of hits per day) on a server with a few 100MB RAM and a few GB hard drives. These days, a million hits/day on a modern web stack (anything past static HTML and PHP/Perl) requires a beefy system or even more than a few systems.
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Open Text was the first company that indexed the entire web. They were the search engine behind the Yahoo search button. Open Text used Alpha 64 servers and was at the time one of the largest DEC customers in dollar terms. They were repaid by DEC launching Altavista in direct competition.
Shortly after Altavista started using a large custom machine with an unthinkable 4GB of main memory and Open Text started withdrawing from the SE market.
Clutter (Score:2)
It probably also helped that Google was a simple UI, where AltaVista and all the others were aiming for the portal type UI's with ever increasing clutter and load times.
old history (Score:2)
Nah (Score:2)
Google had a cooler logo.
Retconning - wasn't about search quality at first (Score:2, Interesting)
When I, and those I was working with, first switched to Google the actual search results were different to what you'd "expect" (Altavista's results were the gold standard, any deviation was looked on suspciously) but they were about the same in quality. Later they became better, but it
Uh, Duh? (Score:3)
The whole bit about Google using links as an integral part of PageRank (and this being different from AltaVista, et al) has been public information since around the day Google went live. Google, for all their secretiveness, has never been shy about that bit. (And, of course, it led to the creation of the SEO industry, since AltaVista-baiting by simply stuffing keywords colored white past the article over and over stopped working.)
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Shows how hold we are- this was all common knowledge when it occurred- but it's understandable how a 20 something wouldn't know about it.
It's not hard to see why AltaVista failed (Score:2)
Better Quality Results (Score:2)
I remember that Google loaded much faster over my dial up modem but mainly the quality of the porn^H^H^H^H tech results was better. Yes, better results for technical information, not porn, nothing whatever to do with porn.
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Aliens.
Information Retrieval (Score:2)
Whenever someone says Information Retrieval I think about that agency in Brazil.
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Then you are doing it wrong. I find everything that is not totally obscure like some error cases in a library almost nobody uses.
Re:And today? (Score:5, Insightful)
Today search is ALMOST ENTIRELY SHIT. It is used because shit is king.
If you think that, you don't remember Alta Vista, which had millions of links to "Page not Found" and in the search results had multiple listings to the same (often broken) page.
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Today search is ALMOST ENTIRELY SHIT. It is used because shit is king.
If you think that, you don't remember Alta Vista, which had millions of links to "Page not Found" and in the search results had multiple listings to the same (often broken) page.
I remember AltaVista well and broken links in many search engines in the 1990s. But just because search engines don't direct you to broken links as often anymore doesn't mean they're better.
Now, rather than millions of broken links, search engines direct me to millions of websites that don't contain my search terms and often have nothing to do with what I'm searching for.
Is that really much of an improvement? Actually, I think it's worse -- because it takes me a fraction of a second to see a 404 error
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Re:Was Altavista... (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes, Altavista was better than Yahoo. I remember reading that Yahoo was a static directory, updated by humans; whereas AV had a newfangled web crawler. Anyone remember the term 'spider'? Altavista wasn't known all that well though, and it was part of my geek cred to show it to users. And usually, it found what they were looking for.
Pretty much the moment Google came on the scene though, it was better than Altavista. AVs answer? Plaster the front page with ads and 'content'. Make it a 'portal' to the web.
Heh. Wrong answer.
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Yes, Altavista was better than Yahoo. I remember reading that Yahoo was a static directory, updated by humans; whereas AV had a newfangled web crawler. Anyone remember the term 'spider'? Altavista wasn't known all that well though, and it was part of my geek cred to show it to users. And usually, it found what they were looking for.
My progression - Archie and gang - http://www.albany.net/allinone... [albany.net] which was a lot of different search engines depending upon your quest (now some sort of search engine yet still a bookmark)- AltaVista (Which was good for hacks and cracks) - Yahoo (for it's then search ability) - Google (it's result listings then rated by the most active web pages, and sparse look).
If you POP3 your mail you understand just how badly Microsoft and Yahoo want to route your Email. I still have a handle used in my E-mailer F
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My progression - Archie and gang - http://www.albany.net/allinone... [albany.net] which was a lot of different search engines depending upon your quest (now some sort of search engine yet still a bookmark)- AltaVista (Which was good for hacks and cracks) - Yahoo (for it's then search ability) - Google.
Edit: something didn't look right after the submit, a double check (bookmarks) it was astalavista.box.sk not altavista which was the popular search engine at the time
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Plaster the front page with ads and 'content'.
Hell, yes, It took longer to find the frigging search box than to return the results. Also, IIRC, Altavista didn't even own altavista.com, which was some completely separate business. cf. Google.
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Before Altavista there was Webcrawler. But Yahoo took over both and replaced the engines with their own crappy variants.
Before them there was Veronica and Gopher.
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inertia? AltaVista was big before Google existed (Score:5, Informative)
Inertia? AltaVista, Hotbot, and Excite had the inertia. They were the big players when a couple of college students thought up the idea that became Google. AltaVista and the other established players had the inertia.
The established search engines also had algorithms based on word frequency in various parts of the page. I did search engine optimisation back then, so I studied it in detail. The simplified explanation is that searching for "Einstein" would return whichever page had the word Einstein repeated the most on the page. Minus points for repeating it "too many" times.
Google had a revolutionary idea. If lots of good pages link to abouteinstein.com, It's probably a good page. That's Page Rank, and it worked quite well. That's the far and above the most important reason Google won - their ranking system was far superior because it was based on a different, better, idea.
* You might wonder how Google knows which pages are "good", in order to calculate which pages are linked to by good pages, and are therefore also good. It's recursive across the whole internet. If lots of pages link to princeton.edu/physics/, and princeton.edu/physics/ links to lab.gov/particles/, then lab.gov/particles/ gains some "good" points. Specifically, it gains an equal share of the Princeton's pages rank value as all other links on Princeton's page. In other words, whatever value a page has, that value is divided equally among each page it links to. So a page "vouches" for each page it links to, but if it links to many pages, it can also pass a small amount of credibility to each.
Re:inertia? AltaVista was big before Google existe (Score:4, Interesting)
PR on the Einstein subset is obvious extension (Score:2)
Understanding PR, one way of finding good pages relevant to Einstein is obvious:
1) You already have the PR, so you know how popular each page is.
2) Disregard all pages that don't mention Einstein.
3) Run PR again, starting with each page's general PR as the initial seed.
From this you'll find that many good pages which mention Einstein link to wikipedia.org/einstein/. Therefore, that page is probably relevant to people looking for information about Einstein.
If you want to, you can also subtract a portion o
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"in order to calculate which pages are linked to by good pages, and are therefore also good. It's recursive across the whole internet"
You speak in the present tense, but I think it's widely believed that today, the original pagerank algorithm plays only a minor role. The original algorithm was very easy to game by building a site with a million auto-generated pages, all linking to each other and to the main page. How they actually do it today is a closely guarded secret, although it's likely that links betw
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As soon as someone figures out how to play the ranking game the rules will change. It has been played over and over again. If I remember correctly there was a hack that caused a search for "general failure" (or similar) to direct to G. W. Bush.
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works, but vs billions of pages, dupes, domains (Score:2)
It still "works" to create thousands of pages which link to the page which you want ranked high, but it doesn't (and didn't) work that that well because the feeder pages lack PR. I know of only two significant, but changes in that regard. As always, a page can only pass on the PR that it has. Because noone links to your feeder pages, they each have an actual PR of 1/(number of pages on the entire internet) . To have a really high PR without external links, the number of pages you create has to be a si
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Rather - Yahoo killed the decent engine and put in their own and that was the final nail in the coffin for Altavista.
There was some crap result in the searches, but with good search statements you could get what you wanted until the Yahoo engine made it impossible.
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Bing - not even a serious competitor. Heck - even DuckDuckGo do a better job.
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If you want to do a better job - go to http://slashdot.org/recent [slashdot.org] and up/downvote articles and you will see the true amound of junk that don't make it.
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Every sentence is a paragraph. Most aren't even complete sentences. It's like a random collection of thoughts. Taken from other sources. Or something.
There. Fixed it for ya :^)