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Ask Slashdot: What's the Best Alternative to Google's Search Results? 155

Posted by EditorDavid from the feeling-lucky dept.
"I first heard about Google here on Slashdot," writes Captain Chad (Slashdot reader #102,831).

"At the time I was using AltaVista for web searches, but Google immediately proved its superiority." Now 20+ years later I struggle with Google's latest system. It appears to be interpreting the perceived intent of my search request instead of using the very specific keywords I provide. I'm often getting results that aren't on the same topic as what I'm looking for, and adding more keywords seems to make it worse. Even using double quotes doesn't help much any more. Google Search has become too "intelligent" for me to use effectively.

So I'm looking for a replacement search engine, one that searches for what I tell it to search for, like Google used to do. With that in mind, what search engine(s) do you recommend?
The question's already drawn several responses. Khopesh (Slashdot reader #112,447) points out that ironically "Doing a Google search for "google alternatives" comes up with a pretty decent list, including DuckDuckGo (powered mostly by Bing) and Brave Search (powered by its own crawler), which are both privacy-first items that do not customize queries to the individual.

Also consider Startpage (powered by anonymized Google queries, see their Wikipedia article).
Other readers shared their own complaints. "Even if no one has a good alternative can someone tell me why pretty much all internet search has become crapified?" asks Slashdot reader Iamthecheese.

My biggest gripe is how Google's search results are technically all referrer URLs -- so if you right-click to copy the link, it's never what you expect. (And that when I search for something that sounds like a product, several rows of the top results are always ads.)

Anyone else? Share your thoughts and opinions in the comments.

And what's best alternative to Google's search results?
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.

Ask Slashdot: What's the Best Alternative to Google's Search Results? More

Ask Slashdot: What's the Best Alternative to Google's Search Results?

Comments Filter:

  • It's about more than just the results? (Score:5, Informative)

    by technology_dude ( 1676610 ) on Sunday May 15, 2022 @07:39AM (#62535024)
    I like a privacy oriented search engine. Most of the time DuckDuckGo does "good enough". If I really really need the best results I'll use Google but for day to day use, my privacy out ranks search results. I guess Google knows what's really really important to me.

    • Re:It's about more than just the results? (Score:5, Informative)

      by Joce640k ( 829181 ) on Sunday May 15, 2022 @08:07AM (#62535084) Homepage

      Hint: You can do more to fight Google by blocking "doubleclick.net" and "analytics.google.com" in your hosts file than by using a different search engine.

      • Re:It's about more than just the results? (Score:5, Interesting)

        by Ol Olsoc ( 1175323 ) on Sunday May 15, 2022 @09:07AM (#62535200)

        Hint: You can do more to fight Google by blocking "doubleclick.net" and "analytics.google.com" in your hosts file than by using a different search engine.

        Yeah it's a tough world out there. I have those blocked, and google has a lot of other data gathering scripts that Noscript takes care of.

        I don't have anything I even want hidden, it's just that if you look into the extent og Google's surveillance and intelligence gathering - it's pretty damn creepy.

        I tell people to install noscript and lookup who it's blocking. Interesting and a bit disconcerting. Anyhow, I do both - block anything google and use DDG. Both is good. I'm a belt and suspenders kinda guy.

        • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

          by Anonymous Coward
          Facebook intelligence can be damned creepy. I can be talking with my partner about something extremely obscure one night and the next day she starts getting ads for it in her Facebook feed. You can tell me that the Facebook app isn't always using the mobile device's microphone to listen to conversations in the room... but I wouldn't believe you.

          • You can tell me that the Facebook app isn't always using the mobile device's microphone to listen to conversations in the room... but I wouldn't believe you.

            Sure, it could be Faceboot. Or it could just be Google, and they could be selling it to Fb. Unless you're on iOS, I guess. Then it's pretty much got to be the former.

          • Facebook intelligence can be damned creepy. I can be talking with my partner about something extremely obscure one night and the next day she starts getting ads for it in her Facebook feed. You can tell me that the Facebook app isn't always using the mobile device's microphone to listen to conversations in the room... but I wouldn't believe you.

            I haven't seen the schematics, but I'm pretty certain that they monitor every thing that is possible to monitor, unless your phone is both turned off and in a metal case. The surveillance is quite efficient and very thorough. This is conjecture of course, but there seems to be a lot of coincidences.

        • Re:It's about more than just the results? (Score:5, Informative)

          by lsllll ( 830002 ) on Sunday May 15, 2022 @03:14PM (#62536416)
          Don't shut your Pihole [pi-hole.net]! Seriously, just install that as a VM somewhere, configure it for a DNSSec on something like dns.watch, and 99% of your ad and privacy problems will be solved.
        • I need the best search results possible for a large part of my job, even then it can take hours or days to find what I'm looking for. But at this point Google is going downhill, if your search terms are too big they'll turn up nothing. Meanwhile DuckDuck, which uses Bing btw (feels weird typing that but whatever), actually turns up results in those cases.

          I'm not saying Google still isn't the best generally, but that it is noticeably beginning to slip.

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by Z00L00K ( 682162 )

        Blocking unnecessary sites is what I use uBlock and Noscript for.

        But you also have the Qwant [qwant.com] search engine.

      • Indeed. I've used the MVPS [mvps.org] hosts list for years.

      • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

        by Anonymous Coward

        You can do even more to prevent the Beast from collecting yet more data.

        Use startpage.com, it's Google without the Google. Plus you can view sites anonymously directly from the interface. Plus they don't block anonymous access to the search itself like Google does.

        With that said, I use DDG most of the time because I want to support them. The have their free email protection service and app tracking protection service. Good things.

      • Google Analytics Opt-out to the rescue. Simply add it to you browser: https://tools.google.com/dlpag... [google.com]

    • Just tried it.

      In its attempt to look not-google Brave's UI is practically unreadable.
      Trying to find a fix in the settings had me dumped into a "prove you're not a robot" hole, out of which, after about a dozen attempts, I failed to find a way out. Guess I'm a robot now.

      So... yeah... there's more to a search engine than just results. Usability is a kind of a big thing too.

      • Trying to find a fix in the settings had me dumped into a "prove you're not a robot" hole, out of which, after about a dozen attempts, I failed to find a way out. Guess I'm a robot now.

        I'm not clear on what Brave, (a browser IIRC), has to do with Google and the "prove you're not a robot" BS. Anyway, for those of you who get sent to Google's "Captcha Hell" there's a quick way out. Simply clear all cookies and local storage for Google - I do this on FireFox with the Cookies Quick Manager add-on, but I'm sure there are others. Anyway, it's much faster than doing the captchas.

        Also, when I'm having a particularly hard time cutting through Google's bullshit to get decent results I've taken to c

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Z00L00K ( 682162 )

          Altavista wasn't bad untill Yahoo gobbled it up. Especially the "NEAR" keyword was useful.

          Never underestimate the intelligence of the person doing the search.

          • Altavista's architecture couldn't scale like Google's. NEAR probably couldn't scale either, that's more expensive. The days of Altavista were days with grossly less content to index.

          • altavista was a zombie by the time yahoo got it.

            I used it in its heyday.

            It did what it did well because its real purpose was to showcase DEC's alpha processor.

            It was still doing fine when google eclipsed it.

            It wasn't that it couldn't search well, but rather that google had far more indexed, with a geometrically going gap.

            Google's algorithm, stripping out pretty much everything but AND in its early days, and limiting to ten keywords, was good enough to search itself lightning fast. It even displayed the tim

        • I'm not clear on what Brave, (a browser IIRC)

          It's a search engine too. [brave.com]

      • ...Brave's UI is practically unreadable.

        I don't know which site you're using, but search.brave.com is very simple and straightforward.

        • Font style used is thinner than normal and for reasons of "let's look as un-like-google as possible" - it is gray.

          IF you're using a dark theme, it is almost bearable.
          It's still harder to read than the same search on Google or DDG, but at least the screen doesn't suddenly look as if it's been left in the sun too long.

    • Hell no, it isn't! The quality of the results is the only issue. Until recently Google was an order of magnitude better than the results I got from DDG (and presumably would from Bing).

      Now results on search engines give are simply miserable. The specific issues I see are:
      - an assumption that you want similar results to what you received previously rather than to expand the information horizon
      - an overly aggresive priority on selling you something
      - providing useless snippets in the search results focusing

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Kokuyo ( 549451 )

        Give me a holler if you do this. I'd be willing to buy you a beer a week if it's any good.

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by Kokuyo ( 549451 )

        By the way: Your username pretty much nails my standard reaction to just about anything with a user interface...

  • My search routine (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Rosco P. Coltrane ( 209368 ) on Sunday May 15, 2022 @07:41AM (#62535034)

    - Hit DuckDuckGo for most everything
    - Hit Google to look up stuff for sale OR for extremely precise, extremely obscure technical questions - they're still better than DDG for that.
    - Hit Bing for porn. Seriously, it's amazing how good Bing is at finding weird porn. I kid you not! It's not good at finding anything else though.
    - Hit Yahoo for nostalgia.

  • Not superior anymore (Score:3)

    by damaki ( 997243 ) on Sunday May 15, 2022 @07:42AM (#62535036)
    Google is not superior anymore; DuckDuckGo (duckduckgo.com) and Brave Search (https://search.brave.com/) are really good. When I do not find something in either of these search engines, I never find anything in Google either.

    • Duck Duck Go doesn't work very well for technical lookups, and neither did Bing for that brief period I tried it.

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by damaki ( 997243 )
        It is not that it does not work well, it is that you need to relearn to do a web search. Google's index is not that much superior, what is superior is their profiling engine, which is mainly design for their advertising networks but is used to adapts result to a user. So, if you do the same search in another search engine, just assume the search engine is a blank page and it does not know about your job, your habits and your preferences, so your search needs to be more precise.
        Let's have a look at a glarin

  • DDG and Kagi are OK (Score:3)

    by doragasu ( 2717547 ) on Sunday May 15, 2022 @07:51AM (#62535050)

    I have been using DDG for years and it works great, I only had to use !g a handful times in years.

    Currently I am evaluating kagi.com and it works even greater than DDG, but I still don't know if it will replace DDG for me as default search engine.

  • Google following Amazon on search (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Zelo997 ( 6356746 ) on Sunday May 15, 2022 @07:51AM (#62535052)
    Seems to me that Google is copying the example of Amazon. Deliberately make your search function less efficient to boost your analytics of how long people spend on your pages and the number of pages they look through to increase Advertising revenue.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      Google's search engine is overall the best, which is not to say that there aren't compelling reasons to use alternatives but for general queries Google is unbeatable.

      Often if you ask a question you get the answer in a snippet, you don't even have to visit another site. It does things like currency/unit conversion and maths for you. It stays current too, and integrates data from other sources like Maps so it can tell you opening times, how busy a place is right now, and other timely information.

      For privacy t

      • For privacy there are alternatives with worse results but no profiling (or so they claim - if you don't trust Google then why would you trust those other sites?)

        For specialized searches there are alternatives like Shodan for internet connected devices.

        It's certainly a good idea to not trust anyone in particular. But if we take using DDG. 1 script.

        Google - here's one. I opened a gmail account this past weekend for a person on a computer I was setting up for him. Had Noscript, Privacy Badger, and adblock on it. He wanted the web interface.

        My computer Condoms went nuts stopping ad and scripts when I was finished settin it up - but the freaky thing was Google bypassed Noscript's default and changed their scripts to "trusted". And those are some of the sa

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

          Are you sure that Google somehow changed the settings in NoScript? It wasn't just some default config that NoScript had to avoid breaking a very popular website?

          Google allows NoScript and other add-ons that block its ads and data gathering to be on its official Chrome add-on site. It really doesn't seem bothered by them, and searching (on DDG) I can't see anyone else reporting this behaviour.

          • Besides it's Firefox that reverts your settings all the time. I have to turn Pocket off again with every single update. They clearly deliberately reverted settings I set to disable it in about:config. It's gotten to the point where there are zero browsers you can trust.

        • Doesn't noscript default to permitting some common things these days? Like, google.com, but not gstatic or google analytics. It's been a while since I installed it myself so I don't recall.

          • Doesn't noscript default to permitting some common things these days? Like, google.com, but not gstatic or google analytics. It's been a while since I installed it myself so I don't recall.

            It blocks all scripts by default. If you go to a page with scripts, it will show them, and you can change the ones you want to temporarily accept. On Firefox, it has all the google scripts marked as untrusted, and you have to work a little harder to allow them.

            For example, if I co to cnn.com at first it blocks their initial script. I temporarily allow it, and the first page loads, then 17 more scripts pop up.

            cnn.com adsafeprotected.com amazon-adsystem.com bounceexchange.com chartbeat.com cnn.io cooki

            • Sure, I'm using noscript, I know how it works in general. I just couldn't remember if it came with anything whitelisted or not. But probably that was adblock plus, and I was cross-remembering

              • Sure, I'm using noscript, I know how it works in general. I just couldn't remember if it came with anything whitelisted or not. But probably that was adblock plus, and I was cross-remembering

                No problem, the description was for anyone else following the thread. Thought it might be helpful.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by gweihir ( 88907 )

        Google's search engine is overall the best,

        Actually no, not for me. Google started to waste so much of my time with irrelevant results that I dropped them about a year ago. These days I again find what I search with reasonable effort. The few times I did not, Google was not any better.

    • I think both Amazon & Google are earnestly trying to make their predictive, personalised algorithms work as well as they can but AI is still shit at second-guessing what people mean.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by gweihir ( 88907 )

        I think both Amazon & Google are earnestly trying to make their predictive, personalised algorithms work as well as they can but AI is still shit at second-guessing what people mean.

        Probably. At least Amazon has now completely borked their recommendation system for books. It used to be reasonable. After an intermediate step that was worse, I have mostly stopped using them with the latest, complete destruction of any usability or sanity. It must be some kind of AI that has an extremely simplistic model of what people want. And that is utterly incapable of learning. These days 90% of the recommendations I get I can immediately remove as stuff I most definitely do not want. I even tried a

        • Re: (Score:3)

          by PPH ( 736903 )

          It must be some kind of AI that has an extremely simplistic model of what people want.

          It's not trying to figure out what you want. It's trying to tell you what you should want.

          Some time ago, marketing stopped trying to serve the customers needs and now sees them as wallets with legs that should be pushed in the direction deemed appropriate by the corporation.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by sinij ( 911942 )

      Seems to me that Google is copying the example of Amazon. Deliberately make your search function less efficient to boost your analytics of how long people spend on your pages and the number of pages they look through to increase Advertising revenue.

      While your theory is plausible, I think simpler explanation is Google's hubris - they think they know better what you ought to want.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by gweihir ( 88907 )

        Seems to me that Google is copying the example of Amazon. Deliberately make your search function less efficient to boost your analytics of how long people spend on your pages and the number of pages they look through to increase Advertising revenue.

        While your theory is plausible, I think simpler explanation is Google's hubris - they think they know better what you ought to want.

        That would be consistent with my observations. One of the reasons I have stopped using them.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by gweihir ( 88907 )

      Ah, yes. Amazon has also mostly killed the utility of their recommendations for books. They used to be decent. Then they got worse. Today they are so abysmally bad that I have started getting my recommendations elsewhere. It is like they are actively trying to drive customers for books away.

      • They AI can't tell the difference between what the discriminating reader also read and what the current rabble of idiots also read. I've read the "Harry Potter"s, "The Hunger Games" and "50 Shades" more because they were topical at the lunch room tables amongst my coworkers than I did for their literary value; so I don't put that much stock in their recommendations.

  • work from home (Score:4, Funny)

    by Anonymouse Cowtard ( 6211666 ) on Sunday May 15, 2022 @08:18AM (#62535100) Homepage
    Run your own web-crawler, spider, indexing service. There's plenty to choose from on github. A bonus is your regular traffic becomes obfuscated by default.

  • Why are you allowing cookies when they're not necessary or required? Get rid of any google cookies / login / storage for any version/ userid you use for searching. Make others for services which need cookies.

    • Why are you allowing cookies when they're not necessary or required? Get rid of any google cookies / login / storage for any version/ userid you use for searching. Make others for services which need cookies.

      There is a lot more going on than just cookies.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by redelm ( 54142 )
        Yes, which is why I included "storage" for other (scripty) data. You cannot much hide your IPv4 address but VPNs and gateways increase the possible identities. No prayer with IPv6 unless you and your ISP strip bits. The real question is what is the extra research worth to analphabet?

        • Yes, which is why I included "storage" for other (scripty) data. You cannot much hide your IPv4 address but VPNs and gateways increase the possible identities. No prayer with IPv6 unless you and your ISP strip bits. The real question is what is the extra research worth to analphabet?

          I would assume there is a lot of parallel construction going on. Possibly they are cashing in on that.

          I really don't have anything I do online that I wouldn't admit to my mother, I'm pretty plain vanilla. But I have long said that every single thing you do on the internet, from searches to sites to keypresses to locations is available to interested others - if you become interesting to them for some reason.

          So if I was doing anything nefarious, you can bet none of it would be on a computer attached to t

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by redelm ( 54142 )
            Agreed it is beyond creepy and worse. The self-restraint is part of the objective. So don't give in.

            But snooping also costs, especially as more and more traffic gets encrypted. This post is HTTPS. It wasn't 10 years ago.

            Whether you're doing something "nefarious" is not relevant -- it might be considered such in 5-10 years; and many of our "leaders" (both political & corporate) are perverts, probably correlated with the amount of egotism required to win the job. I dont want them subject to more bla

            • Https only in the transfer. Once stored it can be scraped. But yes, if you are anonymous they won't be able to connect you.

              The other issue is that your ISP can sell the data to connect you to the post.

          • That's not really germane to the conversation. It matters not whether you did something you want or need to hide. It is about ensuring that privacy is held above all, especially above the greed of big tech.

  • I've moved away from Google (Score:3, Interesting)

    by BuckeyeSlashdot ( 9807978 ) on Sunday May 15, 2022 @08:22AM (#62535108)
    I've been using Presearch the past 6 months and like it. It might be in my head, but I feel the results are more accurate and less tailored. I still jump back to Google from time to time, but it's rare. Presearch makes it easy to jump to other search engines if you don't like their results. My wife uses Brave search and likes it. I use the Brave browser, but for some reason I don't enjoy their search engine as much.

  • ... but Google's the "best" at turning search terms into advertisements. Turn on the "News" category filter on any of these search engines and search for something that isn't obviously an item that can be sold, such as "lapdesk". On Brave, DuckDuckGo, or Bing (all these are the same engine, really -- Bing), you'll find 1-2 "monetized" results. But Google! 100% monetized.

    So looking for a search engine alternate is probably a lost cause. Everything is monetized. But you can still get them to give you normal r

    • Also, I forgot to mention that Google has a "Verbatim" search option under the Tools menu on the results page. But it won't help you avoid the monetization optimization, and in fact can make it even worse. YMMV.

  • Kagi (Score:4, Interesting)

    by jemmyw ( 624065 ) on Sunday May 15, 2022 @08:29AM (#62535122)
    I've been using kagi.com for the last month. It's quite good, a bit slow but it does come up with better local results than DDG and I like the programming filter. It's supposed to become a paid service at some point.

  • Separate browsers for each search purpose (Score:5, Interesting)

    by zerosomething ( 1353609 ) on Sunday May 15, 2022 @08:45AM (#62535150) Homepage

    I've been using one browser (Safari) with DuckDuck and other privacy tools for all my personal stuff. Results are fairly good. For work I use another browser (Chrome/Firefox) and Google search and don't try to hide anything from Google. Then the algorithm gets tuned to work related searches.

  • DDG is good most of the time, more precise than Google really. The occasional search though (often on complex technical topics) confuses DDG, and I get better results on Google. So that's usually my second choice. Also, if you block JS and ads, DDG has a long pause before displaying results. If I'm in a hurry and expect to have to repeatedly refine my search, I'll jump to Google.

  • Even if no one has a good alternative can someone tell me why pretty much all internet search has become crapified?

    That's easy to answer: the internet itself has changed. The dispersion of the content is totally different today than it was 10-20 years ago. I'll leave you to consider the specifics of that.

    • I will clarify: Content used to be on the internet because the poster wanted it to be out there.

      Now content is on the internet to draw in viewers for the almighty tracking data and advertisement views.

      In short, the internet used to be about sharing and now it is about profit.

  • That explains a lot. I use ddg but have had to occasionally resort back to Google because the results are such utter shit.

  • Referrer URLs (Score:3)

    by theskipper ( 461997 ) on Sunday May 15, 2022 @12:16PM (#62535778)

    "Searchlinkfix" works well for bypassing, have used it in Firefox for years.

    Available in addons but repo is here for completeness: https://github.com/palant/sear... [github.com]

  • If I type "A and B" I want both in each of the result articles that come up. And that is very rare and very disconcerting. I am very ok if nothing comes up, but I only want the results to include both A and B.

  • The real problem (Score:5, Interesting)

    by wakeboarder ( 2695839 ) on Sunday May 15, 2022 @12:32PM (#62535830)

    Is Google has screwed up search results. You can no longer explicitly search for information that's handed to you by AI. Let's say you're looking for specific type of pony, where there are only a few pages that have that info. You'll never see the results for those pages because Google knows that you are searching for ponies and it will give you all the popular results it knows about on ponies, and it knows nobody really wants to know about those specific kind of ponies that you're searching for.

    I know this because I'll do a lot of electronic component searches, it used to be that you could explicitly type in the characters that you were looking for and it would give you the results of all the pages no matter how specific things were this kind of broke a few years ago and you can no longer search for explicit information. Google knows better than you, and it's really sad because search engines no longer search the whole internet anymore.

    The real problem is nobody can equal Google to the information that they have access to, an internet is probably become too large to index everything since most web pages of change from being text only to multimedia factories. And a lot of people just don't make web pages anymore. Gone are the days of setting up your own web server and posting information.

  • Haven't seen anyone mention Mojeek, but that's another one. Seems worth mentioning, though I've barely used it myself.

  • ...do we judge the goodness of a search engine? Let's pretend we scientists. What are the qualities consider. Relevance of results? Utility or value of the page that was linked? Incidence of 4xx http errors? Confidentiality our browsing history?

    And when we identify the qualities, how do we quantify them? How do we weight them relative to each other?

    I have an idea of how I would go about it. Do you?

  • It gives you Google search results but anonymizes it through a series of servers before the results get to you. So you get the best of both worlds - superior Google search results without the creepy following that Google does.

    DuckDuckGo has, in my experience, sub par search results. They are also starting to take advertising dollars so I'm not sure if their search results are as anonymous as they claim.

    I haven't used the Brave search engine much but it appears to be pretty safe.

    Last on the list are Google,

  • It's probably not the best, but I now leave a browser tab open to Google, with the verbatim tool setting selected, constantly. If I want search something, I select that tab. I typically hibernate the computer at the end of the day anyway, so it's there tomorrow.
  • I had to stop using them because the results started being completely irrelevant to my keyword queries - most times not even containing the keywords whatsoever! I've had to fall back on Google, bit are the really following suit now?

  • I use a locally hosted SearXNG metasearch engine.

    https://docs.searxng.org/ [searxng.org]

    There is also the original Searx:

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]

    and there are also public Searx and SearXNG search engine sites all across the Internet:

    https://searx.space/ [searx.space]

    From that website:

    "SearXNG is a free internet metasearch engine which aggregates results from more than 70 search services. Users are neither tracked nor profiled. Additionally, SearXNG can be used over Tor for online anonymity.

    Get started with SearXNG by using on

  • Blame Amazon (Score:3)

    by speedlaw ( 878924 ) on Sunday May 15, 2022 @09:06PM (#62537274) Homepage
    The Amazon Affiliate Link is what killed search results. Hey, I'm interested in THING. Let me search that for information. What do you get ? First 50 hits for THING claim to be reviews but are just copy-paste ad nonsense from the THING company website with "click my link at bottom". It takes work to find some sort of actual review, not just SEO ad copy. The fact that thousands of people now sit around and code SEO for Amazon free is not surprising....but that's why results now suck for any consumer product.

  • Whoogle. I have it self-hosted.

  • Google did NOT âoeimmediatelyâ prove its superiority. In fact it was inferior in particularly significant ways.

    As an example, searching for the phrase âoeto be or not to beâ would yield no results with Google (or garbage results), whereas AltaVista understood the query fine. This is because Google was cutting corners and throwing away short words.

    AltaVista ultimately killed itself. I remember an internal email thread that made this defeat well understood to most of us. Someone asked if it was intentional that we were serving pop-under ads on the front page of the site (pop-under ads were where a popup window would be created and immediately be moved into the background.. you typically saw this on seedy porn sites). The short answer came back âoeyesâ, and it was almost universally interpreted (from my experience at least) as the most clear sign that weâ(TM)d lost.

    AltaVista kept making the front page more and more complicated. Google kept its front page empty simple and clean. That was the only way that Googleâ(TM)s engine was superior at that time.

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