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AltaVista is much harder to type and Yahoo and Google only need 3 letters to type vs 6.

http://search.yahoo.com/

http://search.msn.com/

http://www.av.com/

If you want just search, you can get just search. Besides, why aren't you using the search box in Firefox or a QuIcKs1l\/3r plugin for all your searching? That's even more compact.

Just a thought: automated webpage translation services like Babelfish and Google's language tools can translate arbitrary webpages yet preserve images and navigation. This only works because the web works via hyperlinked text documents. But if you want to read a website that uses AJAX for navigation, these systems will break -- they can't intercept your XmlHTTPRequests. And even if there was a browser extension that could do that, it would be unclear what text needed to be translated and when. So here's one example of a useful tool that depends on HTML transparency, broken by more programmatic clientside techniques.

In this case, I am sure somebody would sure develop a cheaper, better engine.
You cannot have to pay to access features you always had for free (13 years ago,Yahoo had a classification and 10 years ago Altavista was the fastest and most accurate engine around).
Now, Google is the best but as the title says : it's "stil" so it WILL change and it's normal. You don't want a behemoth to stay for ever and you don't want to be financially tied to even the best of all...

That's what I am still using Altavista :
-nice page...
-I AV'ed it a long time ago :)

They are, however, indexed by Altavista. I found many of my comments there.

Here in .CH, we've got Postmail.ch, which has got a damn good PIM fully sync'able.
Also, as the Swiss Post is a gov agency, I guess this will still be here in a few decades...
I don't think Google might last that long : remember Altavista before Google ? There are still here but nobody (but me, especially because of their superior query language) care anymore...

• I own a forum on top of which I put a robots.txt file which is supposed to STOP any spider from visiting it.
  I however find my post while googling for words they also contain.
  How can one explicitely forbid Google from indexing a site ?
  
• My wife developed 2 web sites which never got indexed even though we submitted these using Google's interface. As they might not be linked, I suppose Google just considers that if nobody mentions a site, then the site should not be registered as existing ? Do Google think it actually is the web ?

It was inevitable I suppose. Once the lay public got their hands on it en-mass, the search-spammers targetted it. Once the google users hit a certain critical mass, it all went downhill.
Perhaps we should just keep the next best thing to ourselves...? ;-)

Ahh but now they are leaving best thing before Google alone.

And Alta Vista's Babble Fish is ferther along than Googles language tools.

Now they have one of the shortest URLs I know: http://av.com.

Let's get back too the ROOTS: Besides this political aspect (Google who claimed they were using Linux will only see their service's quality lower after Kro tell them to drop it for some NTXPCE2003 stuff), av.com is also much more reliable when it comes to filter requests (+url=tompox -link:mirko +toto* ...).
BTW, if you look for "end the" (qquotes included) on AV.com, you'll get the expected results.
In Google, some ""the end" will appear within the top 10 results...

Check out, with Onkel Babelfish if your Deutsch is as bad as mine....

http://www.heise.de/newsticker/data/ju-15.08.03- 00 1/

That is a little different. The data you received clearly had a common structure as it was just retrieved from a database and placed into a template.

Actually analysing language is a much more difficult task. Just look at the very imperfect quality of language translation tools on Google and Altavista to see just how hard it is.

The only true solution would be to eliminate money in the world and move to a non-magic-fish-based economy. Ideally, we'd all be practicing Utopian Socialism, but unfortunately people are inherently greedy and can't practice such a system without trying to take advantage of each other.

Vikings are cool.

but google doesn't let you nest boolean queries, as you can at AV. For instance: (solaris NEAR SunOS) OR (windows AND NOT workgroups) AND NOT (host:microsoft.com OR host:sun.com) or: (((bill OR hillary) AND clinton) OR "Monica Lewinsky" OR ((al OR albert OR tipper) AND gore)) NEAR (scoundrel OR loser OR crook OR perjury OR ratbastard)

but google doesn't let you nest boolean queries, as you can at AV. For instance: (solaris NEAR SunOS) OR (windows AND NOT workgroups) AND NOT (host:microsoft.com OR host:sun.com) or: (((bill OR hillary) AND clinton) OR "Monica Lewinsky" OR ((al OR albert OR tipper) AND gore)) NEAR (scoundrel OR loser OR crook OR perjury OR ratbastard)

They'd always been my favourite until they put a banner on their text-only page, that really pissed me off, but thankfully it's gone again.

I think I'll still be using the above link for quite some time to come (except when searching for obviously post-July info), unless Google come up with a decent implementation of AVs boolean capabilities as mentioned above.

Al.

Try av.com. Its short, sweet, easy to remember, and just as useless as altavista.com.

testing

asd

testing

asd

+ insist on a word or phrase or meta term
- reject a word, phrase, or meta term

where the meta terms are

host:
url:
image:
link:
title:
...and many more

So, to find Signal 11 trolling on Slashdot and not on Kuro5hin:

+Signal_11 +troll* +host:slashdot -host:kuro5hin -timothy -Jon_Katz

where the _ will be treated as a non-breaking space and the * will get troll(s)(ed)(ing) as a wildcarded stem. Oh yeah, I've found the -timothy and -Jon_Katz to be useful for increasing relevance :)

Now that search might look complicated but I was trying to illustrate a lot. Just get in the habit of doing all your searches with +plus +prefixes , then add in -terms and +/- host: to clean up the results. easy.

Try this.

Compare with the hell that pours your modem whenever reloading av.com's index page.

Try av.com/?text

I use google almost exclusively, but AltaVista is still useful sometimes. And when I do use it I prefer text mode (originally created for text-based browsers like Lynx)

----

I sent a message to the webmaster, and I got this reply:

Well, I think we should give them some time. Joshua answered a friend of mine in the same way: "Our thinking was to send text-only users to AltaVista, which has a search that is meant specifically for text-only browsers." "We are currently working on text-browser-enabling Raging Search. The work (optimizing pages for text-only browsers and making sure no functionality gets lost) should be done soon." Even better!

--

This topic of napster is driving me up a wall. What napster provides is esentially a search of links to files on other individuals computers, which in and of itself is completely legal. They do primarily the same thing that mp3.lycos.com or a quick multimedia search for MP3's at AltaVista would do as well. Now it may provide an easier way of doing this by making much of the process transparent, but it is in no way different. Why not sue these other companies for providing links to the information? Because linking is LEGAL . And once Napster proves to the courts that they are not hosting any copywritten material on their servers, they have simply a database that is similar to the ones above, the RIAA and the other ignorant bands may get it through their thick skulls that they can't get companies like napster for this.

It could be used to filter out sites that have the HTML DeCSS program.

eg:

Searching on Altavista for '+link:decss.zip -link:pigdog.org' would show sites offering a download of decss, but not if they had your button.

What I suggest to offer downloads of the real DeCSS, is you create the link using JavaScript. Search engines don't index that.

eg:

<script language="javascript">document.write('<a href="decss.zip">decss</a>');</script>

But then how many people have JavaScript enabled?

dynamic content makes the technical quantity of distinct "pages" far greater than a billion.

Surely you are correct. However, the operative term in that phrase is "indexable". I'm quite sure that neither Inktomi nor many other "spiders" such as AltaVista (to name one big one) can traverse links to dynamically generated pages. So even if the number of indexable pages is over one billion, that indeed leaves much content out of the big picture.


Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum viditur.

• http://live.av.com/scripts/editorial.dll?bfromind= 940&eeid=990341&eetype=articl e&render=y&ck=

av.com/?text=y



----

try http://www.av.com?text=yes
for those bad browser days

I'm posting to /. using Alsa Vistas free access(free beer) and it's not costing me a dime. nada, zippo, bupkiss, null, not a thin red dime, nuthin'. There are others (Netzero comes to mind) that also offer free dialup access to the net.

How's the service? sometimes I have to dial twice, but I usually I get a 40+k connection (better than my last ISP). Yea sure I have to look at adds, but I just put the add in the corner of my 2nd monitor and ignore it.

I would have to agree that MONEY=FAST ACCESS, but right now, ~50K access has a very low cost right now, and will be getting cheaper.