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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.
why doesnt google do boolean?
Wish they would fix that.
Kirk, make it so.
I hope they get it back in shape. Altavista has a few tricks up its sleeve that Google hasn't matched yet, like the ability to do an exact-string search. I find that looking up names is sometimes easier with an AltaVista search:
+"Larry Wall" -"Perl"
AltaVista also allows meta searches, like "which pages link to mine?" Google just doesn't have that. I use it for everything else, though.
~chrisRead the full text my book Perl for the Web
The only advantage Alta Vista has over Google is proper Boolean search terms. If Google would get that, I'd drop Alta Vista from my bookmarks in a Planck Interval.
However, the one thing that keeps me using Alta Vista can be demonstrated with this example:
Earlier today, a co-worker and I were discussing
Signetic's ficticious write only memory .
I wanted to see if anybody had ever put a copy of that data sheet up.
Now, searching with Google and the terms Signetics "write only memory" gets me over 80 hits, the last 40 of which have NOTHING to do with my search at all - they just contain one or more of the words. Note the quotes - I was searching for the exact phrase "write only memory", a distinction lost upon Google.
Now, searching on Alta Vista with Signetics near "write only memory" yeilds 57 hits, all of which are direct references to what I am looking for (most of which are mirrors of ESR's jargon file entry). Adding and not ("jargon file") neatly removes those, leaving 43 hits.
Why cannot Google add boolean searching to their engine? Perhaps they could do an initial fetch as they do now, then refine it with a boolean search?
www.eFax.com are spammers
Whilst I still used Windows at home, I have to say that the google toolbar has to be the most excellent search aid that I ever installed. Type any word into it, and you could choose to either search for them or (and this was the best bit) highlight EVERY occurance of the word on whichever page you happened to be on, just like when you look in the google cache.
Very useful for skim-reading pages to find relevant information, even if it isn't the page that you searched for originally
Redid website on 7/9/2001, Excite hasn't picked up the changes yet.
The old search engines are going to be dead soon. They are flailing away the water of the net, throwing out random links that make no sense, selling off search results to try and keep afloat. Google has taken the net by storm, even my grandmother and little sister use it. Microsoft and AOL try to lure people in with their wretched search engines, but people quickly realize that those are just ill-concieved marketing tools of little real worth. Webmasters all over are abandoning internal search engines for their sites, instead paying Google to do it for them. Yahoo has gone from the king of all search engines to a portal for sex chats, and a messaging client quickly losing its own little war.
Google is the king of all search engines. It is clean and pure, without the convoluted portal structure that has wrecked the others. Bow before Google, beg it to bestow upon you its collection of wisdom, and love it for being so great.
The only reason I go to the altavista.com domain these days is for the Babelfish.
So I hope the AV search engine will still prosper to some degree, so that the whole business doesn't tank and they take the Babelfish with it.
The article points out that they tried to go up against AOL and Yahoo. Might they have lost viewers simply because they're name is too long to bother typing? google.com is easy to type, as is msn.com, etc.
creation science book
Like many here, I too used to use altaVista religiously. Then came the portal debacle. Then the pop up ads. Then the meta-refresh. Then, all of a sudden I couldn't find the seach input. You are a search engine, therefore the only thing I care about on your page is the input and the results.. The usage numbers verify this statement.
The beauty of Google is that it has none of these.
A weird side effect is that if you search Altavista for "google", good luck trying to find out how big a number it is...unless you follow the link that Altavista figures out for you.
I'm not sure it is a widely known feature (I just discovered it recently), but I've grown pretty fond of news.altavista.com. A normal search engine will rarely spider a news site quickly enough to be of use for the searches of the sort "there is a news story on the radio, let me go to the net and find out what they are really talking about" variety. Does anyone other than altavista offer a search engine of this sort?
... is one of the most interesting things to hit the Internet since Al Gore personally hooked up the first two Vaxes. People don't talk about it much, but a caching mechanism that efficient it has some rather far-reaching implications, not all of them necessarily good.
For example, more and more often I find myself just hitting the "Cached" link on a Google result, instead of bothering to go to the original site. Why put up with the threat of 404 errors with long timeouts, obnoxious Javascript, and pop-up ads, when you can get most of the content you're looking for straight from the search engine itself?
To some extent the Google cache threatens the ability of a site operator to gauge the site's popularity. If I were Google, I'd be tempted to turn the cache into a key part of the company's business: offer webmasters a "cache hosting" agreement (what's the difference between an original host and an up-to-date mirror?) that guarantees frequent updates and provides detailed statistical reporting, in exchange for a small monthly fee. Any advertising on the site would also need to be presented to the viewer of the cached copy.
IMHO something like this needs to happen, and soon. Otherwise, webmasters are going to become tempted to disable caching of their content to avoid lost page hits and ad revenue. And Google is going to get tired of paying for the bandwidth costs associated with being treated like a giant free hosting provider.
It's almost like a content-syndication feature, rather than a pure search-engine feature. I'll be surprised if their current caching model lasts much longer.
Dahlmann tightly grips the knife, which he may have no idea how to use, and steps out into the plain.