AltaVista Can't Keep Up

jedrek writes "MSNBC is reporting that Altavista, the great search engine, isn't able to keep it's listings current. Altavista hasn't renewed it's index since July which, seeing how it's almost November, is a tad too long." AltaVista was my weapon of choice until Google came along and was so much better that most net users jumped ship.

Comments

Re:What use is Altavista nowadays?

[brunes69]

Google does have an advanced search, with phrase mayching and the "AND, OR" boolean matching that made altavista usefull. It just isn't as widely publicized as altavista's was.

Try here for the advanced search, and here for how to use Google's pattern matching, its actually quite good (as is everything in Google).

Re:google vs altavista

[keesh]

Google also allows this. Go to http://www.google.com/advanced_search and look near the bottom of the page.

Left behind

[maniac11]

Alta Vista has certainly been an innovator in its day... and was by far the best search engine until Google.

They were the first to have a searchable full-text database and asian character sets (Chinese, Korean, Japanese).

Don't forget about Babel Fish either... seems like this alone would be enough to keep them alive...

Ah well, wish them luck in a very difficult market.

Re:If only google would...

[TheTomcat]

write.only.memory

is the proper way to search for "write only memory" on google.

What about + and -??

[alienmole]

Forget the advanced search. Try using stragically placed + and - to force presence or absence of terms. E.g. the following:

+Signetics +"write only memory" -antonym

returns a bogus press release as it's first result, which may be what you're looking for. (I used "antonym" because many jargon file copies don't explicitly say they're from the jargon file.)

I agree with the person who said you may be overspecifying your searches. The point is to find the stuff you want - as long as it lets you do that without much difficulty, does it really matter if you can't explicitly specify a true boolean search? You'd have to show me a case where Altavista really can find something that Google can't before I'd be convinced. All you've done is show that you weren't that familiar with Google.

Re:What about + and -??

[Earlybird]

• Forget the advanced search. Try using stragically placed + and - to force presence or absence of terms.

Google ignores the plus, since it considers all terms important in the query. It honours the minus, however, for exclusion. Please realize that Googles honours phrases for page ranking. So if you're searching for "write only memory", it sorts on proximity, so you'll get exact phrase hits first, and the lower-ranked results will list documents that merely contain the words "write", "only" and "memory".

Re:shorter name?

[big.ears]

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

Re:Google clearly superior

[RedWizzard]

But most porn pics don't actually have "porn" in the filename so they don't get ranked highly when you search for "porn". Try something like "anal". You'll get a few on the first page if you have the mature content filter off.

Re:If only google would...

[jesser]

"write only memory" (with quotes) works fine for me and returns the same results as write.only.memory.