Slashdot Mirror
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.
can't make $$$ off a search engine can you?
"You done taken a wrong turn."
-Bill McKinney, in Deliverance
I think altavista was everyones choice back before google came around, it had that special URL search where you could search by page that links a certain URL...
It seems to me that the quality of all the other search engines has been degrading since google started getting bigger. i use to use metacrawler primarily (which polls results from many popular search engines) and i used to get useful stuff. Now if I go back and use it, it doesn't bring up much useful stuff. maybe it's just that my standards are raised since using google.
Please help! I'm stuck inside my virtual reality headset!
Google's definately kicking some arse in the search engine category these days.
Used to use Altavista quite a bit too... It's a shame, really.
Why just not make the search engine check individual results(maybe in the order oldest-newest with a threshold as not to overtax the search engine) on a search, and get rid of the 404s? If it sees its share of 404s, don't show it to the user, and update its databse or whatnot so it doesn't have to do it again.
Yes, a self-updating search engine. Where's my VC?
It used to be my altime favourate search engine - until Google came out. Now, I haven't used it in over a year.
Why? Because Google gives me better, more relevant results all of the time.
This is a serious question - for what kind of things is Altavista better at searching for than Google?
The only thing that I miss in Google is the ability to _properly_ search for a phrase, showing only those results which contain the exact phrase. (In my experience, quotation marks get ignored in Google)
Asta La Vista Altavista. I too jumped ship and I am now a googler.
mp3's are only for those with bad memories
Altavista used to be my #1 search destination, but soon when the noise ratio got too high I switched to Excite which had excellent rankings of search results (remember scores such as 87%, etc.? In the day Excite had an excellent ability to dig through the crap and pull out the good stuff), however it switched to a seemingly unweighted system and became unwieldy, and that pushed me to try out Google.com which I know love. Google rocks not only for its excellent ability to dig through the crap, but also for the ability to jump between "Deja" searches and web searches in an instant.
AltaVista just started to look like all the others- commercialized, pushy, and annoying. Why is it that every search engine I visit wants to send me shopping? I mean, I know that's how they make money, but I'm there to search, for God's sake. Google doesn't do that. That's why I love it, not because of accuracy, lots of seach engines are accurate, but because it's fast and graphic free, basically, it doesn't try to get in my way. That's the magic, everybody, that's why nobody cares about any other search engine or directory or whathaveyou.
spacefem.com
I stopped using AltaVista once the load time for the front page got over a few seconds. Google has a nice, quick to load, clean interface. Last time I looked, AV was slow, covered in excess garbage and ads, and made searching take far longer than necessary. The last straw was when it started creating popups asking me if I wanted to go to the UK version.
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
...if Altavista sold out the first few pages of search results for certain words to companies they'd make a lot of money, or even become better. Not condoning this, but doesn't Google/Yahoo do the same thing?
Job? I don't have time to get a job! Who will sit around and bitch about being broke and unemployed then?
Google's superiority can be asserted with a simple test. Search for "porn" on google and you get over 10,000,000 pages. The same search on altavista yields only just over 3,000,000 pages. No wonder everyone uses google.
Your pizza just the way you ought to have it.
How I yearn for those halcyon days of July 2001. A simpler, more innocent time.
AltaVista lets me visit there.
Do not taunt Happy Fun Ball(TM)
Nice article on this now online from Wired, about Google licensing and other parts of its semi-unique profit strategy...
Maybe a different database? "You search your index; we'll search ours. Sure, our results will overlap, but we'll have some of the answers you don't and vice versa." Said differentiation will occur naturally unless strong efforts are made to keep Google's and Altavista's databases in sync.
All I use Altavista for is Babelfish now, other than that, I always use Google to search for anything of importance. None of the other search engines ever really had a chance in my mind...
_______
I just wish I could c:\format Internet
How can this not be a problem with their technology? Are they doing everything by hand? Maybe she means that the humans operating the technology aren't on schedule; in any event I think this points to the installation of management that knows nothing about the technology that drives the company after it became yet another big commercial portal, I think the first thing every /.er thinks of when they read this is, "please don't let this happen to Google." The new features they are adding are great, but they must keep their site small and clean; anything can be taken too far.
"Reality is just a convenient measure of complexity" -Alvy Ray Smith
Oh, never mind. I thought the article was about Astalavista. Phew!
CEE5210S The signal SIGHUP was received.
AltaVista was started by DEC, which sold it off to someone (anyone know?) Anyway, CMGI is the current majority owner. All this passing around may have caused managment to defer decisions related to keeping the database current and available (don't buy servers, don't develop faster search methods).
Contrast Google, which so far hasn't been sold, and still has, IIRC, its original managerial crew.
IANA MBA, so take this with a grain of salt.
The clearance system sounds logical. It is not. It is completely arbitrary. -- John Bolton
I don't understand the complaints about Google's "lack" of an exact string search. Google does pay attention to quotation marks, although it ignores small common words like 'a' and 'the' making it a little annoying. "Get the fish" also returns "Get a fish" and "Get for fish" and probably others. Also, it doesn't see punctuation as a hard separator and it takes some license with posessive ("Larry Wall" will get you a lot of "Larry Wall's") but overall, these minor issues are tolerable compared to the multitudinous advantages of Google.
Altavista used to be my weapon of choice, too. But then I switched to Christopher Walken.
Now I always have someone to talk to when I need to get results.
I must admit, he does tend to make a bit of a song and dance about it, though.
So much available information..........*drools*
damn, that is probably the rudest thing I've ever seen on slashdot. You probably intended that to be anonymous. Moron!
Because, under launguage preferences it's got Swedish Chef (Bork! Bork! Bork!)
Google is always stop #1, followed by support.microsoft.com (guess why) and when THAT doesn't work, Copernic! (www.copernic.com)
"Draco dormiens nunquam titillandus."
Altavista was a slick search engine intil that stupid X10 camera ad campaign. I switched to google just to avoid that. I like it better now, anyway, because it's faster and is more relevant, but (as many others have said), I definitely miss "exact phrase" searches +including and -excluding specific words.
Under capitalism man exploits man. Under communism it's the other way around.
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
(early google beta days) I felt kinda like a pioneer that had stumbled on a secret pile of gold with Google....Now everyone in the office and the home front swears by google and uses nothing else. This is a perfect example of totally burying the competition in the dirt and then rolling over them....Cheers to Google...If a few more small things would have been in place -- you would have seen Linux doing the same to Windows.....(Imagine if todays Mozilla would have been around when IE4 was new....)
Strike early, strike hard...win!
(+1 Funny) only if I laugh out loud.
You know, opinions are like assholes: everyone has one, and ... I forget how the rest of it goes. Something about g**ts probably.
You know, altavista used to publish the date that the pages they search were last indexed at the bottom of each search link. They dropped that off about six months ago. None of the dates were showing up as being 2001. I noticed that search for a page for a site I had updated about three months ago was still showing the previous data.
yup, altavista sucks.
Rich
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
As far as the meta searches on "which pages link to mine?"
Go to google. Type in a URL and then there should be a link that says, find pages that link to url.
The man who trades freedom for security does not deserve nor will he ever receive either. - Benjamin Franklin
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.
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.
Guvegrra?
I used to use google until I found http://vivisimo.com/
Organized search results with document clustering
Sullivan called the company's inability to update search results "inexcusable" and said it feeds suspicions that paid listings take priority over generic search results. "This is something people have been paranoid about. If you're going to start charging people to submit, does that mean Web sites that can't afford to pay will get overlooked?"
Gee, I wonder? I think it's common knowlege that those who pay to be listed are given priority to those who don't, otherwise there would be no motivation to pay. It's economics, plain and simple. I haven't read through the fine print of the Alta Vista usage policy but I'm pretty sure they outline the priority system there. I would be rather surprised if a search engine company charged people for their listings and then didn't give the paying customers some sort of benefit. On the other hand, just because someone doesn't pay doesn't mean they will be overlooked, but they will not get massive amounts of traffic based on their Alta Vista listing. Someone who's semi-comfortable using the search engine will probably construct powerful enough searches that if you're site has what they want, they will see it in their list of matches, probably somewhere close to the top. If someone has the same material on their site and they pay, theirs will be one above yours, and that's the way it should be.
It really is a shame that Alta Vista is getting lazy updating their free listings though, they have a great search tool and I like a lot of their functions, but it is outdated information and like the author I end up using Google most of the time.
~ now you know
It seems to me that AltaVista's problem is hardware and bandwith. (At least that's their excuse.)
...hmmm... in, it's common. This has results in a more normalised portal, search-engine etc. marked where only a few can survive on a commercial basis. The internet is just not a good place for advertisement anymore. People have learned the Internet, how to surf. I'm totally ignorying the ... leatherman ad on top of slashdot and the Opera banner on my upper-right.
Hardware and bandwith trouble is again related to the allmighty buck. This, again, relates to the fact that the Internet isn't new anymore - it's not
Advertisers are becoming more and more aware of this and companies not directly linked to the web - like car manufacturers and toaster manufacturers - just keep a page for ordering, information and support. Their Internet advertisement budget is not very large - it's cheap, that's the only reson to do it. If AltaVista or others were to highten the prices they would loose because a banner spot isn't that valuable, and others would offer it cheaper - and win.
Look a monkey!
Umm... isn't the very core of your purpose to update listings? And you haven't updated non-commercial listings since JULY? Whoever is managing this engine has entirely lost sight of what they need to be doing. Meanwhile google does a hell of a job giving web users what they want, without tons of rather deceitful advertising and gook all over the interface. (of course Google has advertising, but it is clearly deliniated, off to the side, and does not overwhelm true results) Altavista, of course, needs to get their act together or risk collapse.
--hongpong.com
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.
Yes, google does boolean. OR works - but spaces (outside of quotes) are assumed ANDs.
Try the advanced search page
In Google, when you search for a phrase, it tells you half the words are two common, and then gives you the rest out of order.
Got Rhinos?
Around the same time I heard about a new search engine with a more comprehensive search, caching, and a light interface. I was hooked.
I do miss boolean searching, but Google's targeted-text ads are way better than Altavista's destroy-the-entire-usefulness-of-the-search-engine wholesale-whoring-out-their-service-to-corporate-p imps advertisements.
Karma: Bored. (Thinking about resurrecting the "Anyone else is an imposter" joke.)
This is just another moral to the same old story.
The VCs will push you into doing ANYTHING, follow
any short term, well hyped, strategy to try to make a 0.01% better ROI for this quarter.
You can't build a company that is profitable in the long run by changing directions every quarter. This is especially true in technology based businesses where more than half of the total value of the company is the team and not physical assets.
Stonewolf
- Lightning-fast searches. I like how Google rubs it in, too ("search took 0.14 seconds").
- Windows IE toolbar. The most convenient way to search, which includes other neat features like page rank, easy keyword highlighting, etc.
- Good Usenet listing.
- Result translations (someone's already mentioned Swedish Chef, hehe)
- Web Directory has won me over, goodbye Yahoo!
- Almost every single search I've done on Google has given me the most relevant results on the first page. I hardly need to see any further result pages unless my search is obscure or vague.
- Uses very little bandwidth (read: advertising)
It seems like a one-sided battle now. There's just no comparison.Can you cite benchmarks or code audits that validate this?
How does google get current stuff faster than altavista? Smarter webcrawlers? More efficient backend organization of xml? Better knowing when and when not to replace cached copies?
Show me the audit/changelog!
Have google set as their home page when they bring up ye old browswer?
Or am I just weird like that?
--Dave
Ok, so it's a minor plug, but as my sig says, I run Gbloogle from an old machine under my desk. It's a weblog search engine that updates its index every three hours.
Now, apart from the plug (and this being slashdot, and me paying for the bandwidth, gawd knows why I did that), I point this out because even Google only updates every four weeks or so.
For some subjects (and the memes and odd sites you find via blogs are good examples) the specialist search engines are going to become very useful. Things like Distributed Searching, JXTA and so on are the way forward when the web is double the size it is today, and then double again.
The only reason I keep AV bookmarked at all is to answer Kickstart's Question of the Day on UserFriendly. He likes to do "fill in the blank" questions and I find it interesting to search for the pattern he requests.
Miko O'Sullivan
Yes, Google is far and away the best, but it's habit of ignoring common words, even in exact phrase matches, is annoying. "death to infidels" become a search for "death" and "infidels", you have to type "death +to infidels"
Also, I'm a little worried about everyone becoming dependent on one resource like this. Admittedly they seem to have a knack for figuring out the Right Thing, but monoculture is never a great idea in the modern world.
SO YOU'RE GOING TO DIE: The Comic for Dealing with Death
Is an interface within Google that can "search in" previous results.
search.microsoft.com has this feature and it rocks. I can do a non-spacific search at first, then search within those returned pages for a spacific term.
I already find myself using google to search Microsoft's KB 80% of the time (because it is so much faster) - but if Google had a search in function I'd never go back to search.microsoft.com again!
+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.
And here I always thought AltaVista was a Mexican search engine.
...All I can say is that my life is pretty strange...
I love google as most of you do, but I do have a question. It's right to say that not updating your index in a long time makes your results useless, but what do we have to compare Altavista to? How often is Google updated, and how does it keep up to an ever increasing number of pages? Just curious.
I think I'll stop here.
Walk down the hill son, and scr*w them all!!!!
I use a program that polls all the search engines you wish... it's called Copernic
Askjeeves did a clever move and bought Teoma. They wanted to buy Google too several years ago in their glory days, but waren't successful. So they bought directhit back then. Now with Teoma they have real competition for google. They probably try to licence the technology or create internal search engines for sites.
The point is, Altavista should have done this first. They are out of this game unfortunately.
I noticed that a couple months ago AV started spidering "dynamic-looking" pages (like URLs with cgi-bin in them or query strings, etc.) that they previously wouldn't touch.
Perhaps in trying to compete with google's total index size by changing their rules a bit they've spidered more than they can chew, so to speak.
It'll be a sad day when they take down their own index and just replace it with goto (ok.. overture...) results.
Where all the best features come together!
(I stopped using AltaVista when they started using that stupid javascript crap to reload my page just to churn more ad revenue. MAN THAT TICKED ME OFF!)
"A microprocessor... is a terrible thing to waste." --
GeneralEmergency
AltaVista, once known as a premier search provider among Internet cognoscenti,
Internet cognoscenti? Who is getting blown here, the writer, wired, or the reader? All three?
Cognoscenti must be the offspring of the Digerati, who begat Shem.
I used to use AltaVista all the time, but now I use Google. Since AltaVista was severed from it's hardware base, DEC, it has gone downhill. Also, I think the editorial descision to include paying customers as part of the results rather than as separate adds like Google does also make me less likly to use AltaVista.
ttyl
Farrell
CAN-CON 2019 - Ottawa's only book oriented Science Fiction Convention! October 18-20, Sheraton Hotel, Ottawa, Canada h
Yeah, this is mildly offtopic. I'll probably check the "no score +1 bonus" thingy. Anyhow...
Google's new usenet search engine lacks one key feature, much in the same way as you described their web search engine. You cannot view the Message-ID of an article once you've found it.
Oh, their Advanced Search page allows searching on a Message-ID. That would be useful if we knew the Message-ID ahead of time. Unfortunately, the only way we know that is to already have the article from a pre-Google search, or an original copy. (Deja, for example, had its "view original Usenet text" which would display the entire article, full headers and all, as plaintext. Wonderful. Why oh why did Google drop that?)
So, for Usenet articles that get posted in the present day, you can't retrieve the Message-ID any other way. So you can't know what it is to search for it. So if you do manage to hunt it down, you have to refer others to it by either:
So, all you can do is search, and it's next to impossible to repeat a search. Can't cite articles by providing a direct link. Can't look up the ONE SIGNLE UNIQUE THING guaranteed to be present in every article. It's like a bookstore or a library refusing to show you the ISBN numbers. Fucking ridiculous.
Sorry, just needed to get that out of my system.
You cannot apply a technological solution to a sociological problem. (Edwards' Law)
I am included in the jumping ship. It seems altavista.com used to give you what you were looking for, but in recent history, it has been way off. google... right on the money most of the time.
If the site is Slashdotted, you can always check out the cached copy at altavista.
Oh no wait, the cache still has a story about the Y2k bug.
m00.
... I still miss archie.
...and they're not afraid to share it with others?
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
Why is MSNBC publicizing the fact that a search engine is out of date? Is that particularly newsworthy?
The paranoid answer is that they want to discredit other search engines to drive more business to MSN search.
Another symptom of the conflicts you get when MS is reporting news about their competitors.
Google is nice because you can put stuff in the O's.
I should point out that, while Google is great and my personal choice, we should all be aware that they're running ads in Fortune advertising how companies can get "their words" (two line ads) in the search engine results.
I'm quite serious.
I'll still use it, cause it is better, but it's not all that you think it is.
--- Will in Seattle - What are you doing to fight the War?
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
This feature does in fact exist! If you click on "original format" when viewing a usenet posting, it will display in plaintext exactly as you are describing, including the message-ID. It's on the right-hand side near the top, next to "view complete thread".
"This message is composed of 100% recycled electrons."
Google used to scan my small site once a month. The last couple times it came by, it only did the top level pages. Two months in and it still hasn't come back to discover all the new links that were on those top level pages, which lead to a ton of useful files that are otherwise hard to find on the net.
I'm beginning to wonder if they're not having troubles keeping up as well.
Google was so vastly superior that I quickly stopped using anything else except Northern Light for special searches.
I recall the graphical search aid AltaVista experimented with -- which was pretty useful once I learned the tricks. It was necessary to sort through the false hits generated by the "keyword" matching algorithm. Google, however, didn't need such a trick since it used the power of the Internet as its relevancy filter. Now, I'm so used to finding exactly what I want I can't imagine using a different method.
Here's the lesson: better service, better value beats "loyalty" and "branding" with discerning customers.
-- @rjamestaylor on Ello
My search engine progression over the past years looks like this:
veronica(gopherspace anyone?) -> webcrawler(early 90's) -> altavista(late 90's) -> google(current)
with an occational stop into Ask Jeeves and Northern Lights and Deja News. They were all good during their times.
-Derek
(and also free of all those annoying categories.)
Anyone who hates ads needs to look at the great job AltaVista has done with this:
http://www.altavista.com/sites/search/text
Free unix account: freeshell.org
Of course, click-capturing destroys the original purpose of the search engine, which is to make the whole web accessible to the user. Google avoided this trap. Perhaps because they were late into the game, and benefited from the mistakes of others. But I get the impression that their founders just don't like in-your-face web advertising. And it's worked out well for them -- they have no trouble selling their low-key ads.
I use Google for about 95% of my searches. They have two big advantages over everybody else: the most comprehensive index, and the best result-ranking scheme. But I do wish they'd support something more sophisticated than simple stemmed-keyword searches. In some ways Google is the least sophisticated of all the search engines.
I especially miss Infoseek. Still have a T-shirt they sent me after I pointed out some glitches in their spam filters. It would have been nice if Infoseek had stayed out of Disney's clutches and avoided becoming a media-pimp portal. Damn, but we need some serious competition to keep Google from getting stuck in its successful rut. But in today's financial climate, the necessary development bucks are simply not there.
Yes, they are crafted. Crafted to clean out all the assholes attempting to abuse the engine into putting their site first.
Crafted search engine results aren't bad when the people doing the crafting think the same way I do.
Has anyone ever noticed the way Google's results change noticably over a small length of time for the exact same query? I'm not referring the ordinary updating of data, but rather pages that appear in the search results one day, gone the next, and back for the second day. Some days the information seems more complete than others. I notice this the most when I search for something fairly specific that generates only 10's of results. I find this lack of consistency one of Google's primary faults.
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 find Copernic is incredible - it sweeps up all those search engines into its meta-search, including Google and Alta-Vista, sorts the results (in what I find to be a very intelligent manner), and even eliminates bad links from the result set to lower my frustration level. Finally, I'm NEVER bothered by anybody's ads, popups, or other distracting crap. Highly recommended.
Please Rate my comment (and help support Fre
I never use any other search angines than google anymore.
In order to reach popularity, the url for a site has to be really short. In the beginning, to use altavista, you had to type altavista.digital.com,
way too much. In those days I used hotbot (inktomi/wired) for searches, and whenever I drew a blank I would go to altavista.
When google came around, there was no need to use another site, since google is comprehensive, short to type, almost free from clutter, and the results seems to have fewer duplicates and irrelevant info.
I also remember not too long ago another search engine, with a horribly long name. Northernlight or something like that. What were they thinking?
Moral is:
get a REALLY short domain name, and deliver a good product and people will come. Fail on any of these 2 requirements, and you're a fucked company. It doen't matter how good your search engine is, if I have to type somegitnamedthiscompanywithoutthinking.com
I only bookmark specific information, not home pages.
-- Another senseless waste of fine bytes.
You have no idea what you're talking about. Of course you can make money off a search engine. Ask the guys at Inktomi; they started doing it a long time ago. If you are a Google, you license your search technology to someone like Yahoo. Or AOL. Or Red Hat. Or AT&T's and Cingular's and Sprint's mobile subscribers. If your search engine was very popular, you could also create a very easy way for people to advertise on it. All these things bring in money. As long as you bring in more than you spend, you make "$$$".
You should maybe stop reading fuckedcompany. Not everything associated with the Net is doomed.
-B
Ash and Hickory, straight-grained and true, make excellent bludgeons, dandy for the cudgeling of vegetarians.
at one point, webcrawler was a good search engine. There was also Yahoo and excite and altavista and all of them together, dogpile (and more, of course). Popularity has skipped from one to the next (though yahoo has been more portal than search engine, with lists and reviewed sites and such, news and stocks and groups and maps...) And one search engine to rule them. that would be google, right? google seems to be a sort of ending place, which could say something about innovation on the web. Or it could just mean that what is popular is also a Very Good Thing.
&&stuff;
Teoma sucks anyway. It ignores robots.txt and meta tags for deflecting robots. It also doesn't group results.
Besides, Google needs competition to keep them honest.
Lexis/Nexis (a legal/news/other full-text database service) has boolean searching with the most useful search feature I have ever seen: it allows you to search for two keywords and define how close to each other they have to be.
So if you want to find text about Bush and Anthrax, but not just articles in which the two happen to be mentioned generally, you can search for
bush w/10 anthrax
and you will get "Bush said he did not have anthrax", but you most likely won't get an article that mentions them in separate paragraph or sections.
microsoftword.mp3 - it doesn't care that they're not words...
As for many others Alta vista used to be my favorite search engine but now I most often use Google.
But Google seems to lack * (star) wilcard search, i.e. you have write the words exact.
E.g. searching for "Kylix specifications" you do not know if they call it "spec", "specs" or "specification".
At Altavista I can write "Kylix spec*" and get result on all combinations. AFAIK there is not a way to do the same on Google.
- RIF
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.
Seems like I used bad examples to show my point. I should have listed the exact search that I'm most interested in:
+"Perl for the Web"
Google reduces the search to "Perl Web" which brings up mostly false positives.
Agin, I use Google for most things, so I'm probably just not taking advantage of the advanced syntax in most cases.
~chris who apparently failed the Google test
Read the full text my book Perl for the Web
When it was a marketing demonstration, it was spectacular. Then came the sad day when it was seen as a business of its own, and it fell fast . . .
hawk
"AltaVista was my weapon of choice until Google came along and was so much better that most net users jumped ship...
...whammo, I get hit by one of those X-10 ads.
Ditto to that. What made me change was all the "noise" and "junk" AV continually added to their search engine. Recently, I went back there to translate a page to English
If AV were smart, they'd leverage Bablefish and other useful tools to win users back. Instead, while they've tried to become more like Yahoo, they've given their competitor (google) time to implement image and usenet searches.
Someone needs to slap their CIO with a dose of reality.
healyourchurchwebsite.com - WWJB?
With the + and - you get AND, OR, NOT, and MAYBE.
Google treats multiple words as OR conditions and also uses them as context indicators.
searching for THIS THAT will find things that have "THIS" or "THAT" or "THIS THAT". Pages where the words are closer together become more relavent. (The OR condition)
searching for +THIS +THAT is the same as saying "THIS and THAT" on AltaVista. Pages won't be returned unless both words appear on the page. (The AND condition)
searching for THIS +THAT is saying search for THAT, and if it has THIS, then include it as well (Thats the MAYBE condition ).
searching for THIS -THAT means return pages that have THIS on them, but do not include any pages that have THAT in them. (The NOT condition)
As you can see, it lends itself to some very powerful searches with very simple syntax. A far better solution than AND and OR IMHO.
Visit the Arcade Restoration Workshop @ http://www.arcaderestoration.com
I have to say, The reason I use Google is because of the Language options. Finally a search engine in my language. hacker :)
I don't use eleetism in my Email
If only Google would put those cool pop-up ads on their site! That is the only reason I use AltaVista.
here is a slightly slower alternative to altavista:
HastaLaVista Searches
From the site: HastaLaVista receives over 12 million queries a day. As of last Thursday, we had responded to quite a few of them
*grins*
Too bad i don't have mod points right now, or else this comment would have been modded Funny... or would that be Informative? =)
In general when I'm looking for something on the net, I use google, because it works. The same reason I used to use altavista, before the signal to noise got too high.
Last week, I started a search that proved surprisingly difficult. I was looking for the net traces of a guy who had asked for my number (yes, chicks do this), and I was astonished when google turned up nothing of relevance, since this guy had been a sysadmin for years. My three-month old nephew had a bigger net presence.
So after getting nothing on google, I went to altavista, which gave me more results, but only because it included sites that had almost no relevance. More out of stubborness than anything else, I went through all the different search engines I could, and I finally found this guy using hotbot , which has to be the most scorned search engine out there.
It had a bunch of sites not listed in the other engines, and they were relevant. Why? I can't imagine. Does it ignore robot.txt? Has it discovered some secret algorithm that specializes in hard-to-find information? I can't explain it, but I tell you one thing. Next time I can't find something (and I know how to look hard) hotbot will be the place I try.
Do what you're good at, and use what works.
Doing my part to piss off the religious right.
All the web does a good job of picking up Google's loose ends. (Everyone's gotten those completely random sites google sometimes throws your way) When I use it in conjunction with Google, I can almost find anything. (It's ad free and really fast too...)
Once upon a time...
accidentally modded your post to -1 (Troll) when I thought is was +1 (Funny).. sorry, I think I remember from somewhere that posting will remove any moderation I've done so maybe this will work
From my point of view it wasn't that Google got better, but AltaVista, particularly the Advanced Search, got worse due to AltaVista doing the most idiotic things. AltaVista simply doesn't work right anymore. Presumably they let the work experience coders screw around with the algorithms. The Advanced seach, which I would probably still be using if it hadn't changed, no longer gives correct results for boolean expressions. Some of the pages it comes up with have no relevance whatsoever to the boolean search you type in.
IMHO the strength of AltaVista's boolean searching was the strength of AltaVista - with that gone, it was a foregone conclusion that the whole thing would come tumbling down.
...on google is impossible to do.
For example, try searching for the band 'The Who'. Google automatically filters out both words. Ack! At least with Altavista I can do this search and actually find something. Perhaps you can search for "The Who" on Google but I haven't found out how.
That's because the number 10^100 is actually spelled "googol". The search engine's name supposedly has nothing to do with that (and no, they haven't indexed nearly that many pages).
The first spinout attempt was lead by a CEO who wanted AltaVista to be a software company, and was ended by the 1997 market plunge. Then Compaq bought DEC, and eventually sold most of AltaVista to CMGI. They then attempted to convert AltaVista into a portal, since the investment-driven strategy of the day called for eyeballs and land grab. A huge amount of cash was spent on the portal strategy (and very little on the search engine) until the day in April 2000 when eyeball valuations died.
The moral of the story is that market and capital strategy matter just as much as technology.
How do I know? I was one of those three guys!
...-.-
Is it just me, or has no-one mentioned http://www.google.com/linux It can be useful to add linux to all your searches automagically, and you do get a groovy tux in the google logo to boot.
I totally agree that google wipes out *any* competition. However .. what happents when the cometition is gone ? will google still play that nice as it does now ? will it leverage its monopoly ? Am i the only one who is afraid of that ?
If you check the Google site, you'll notice that the advertising links are clearly marked... Yahoo and most other search/index sites do the same thing. If it helps them to continue offering high-quality service, I don't mind.
Good point. I noticed that too, when I first saw the ad in Fortune. But it is a change, nonetheless. As I said, I still prefer to use Google.
While we're on the subject... Has anyone else noticed that Google now includes PDF files in its searching? It indexes the content of the files and even lets you view them as plaintext. That's the best thing since bread came sliced, IMO.
Actually prefer my bread raw. But this is definitely a major bonus feature, IMHO. Almost as good as the way Ximian defaults to let you see what's in the file!
--- Will in Seattle - What are you doing to fight the War?
There's a big difference. We here at grub.org have been working on a distributed crawler, who's whole purpose is to crawl the net AND crawl local content with the sole purpose of looking for changed content, compressing it, and sending it back to us. We've also put together a hacked up install of MnogoSearch on our site (see here), that indexes what we we get back from our crawlers. (Please keep in mind that we flush the Mnogo database fairly often right now if you look.)
;) If it's a matter of deletes/inserts, then I guarantee that their reworking their schema right about now.
Even though we don't crawl beans compared to Altavista, Mnogo still chokes up at just under a million URL inserts a day (at it's best), and that's a problem because we are already crawling 3x that, and have a new client ready for release that does 3x the crawling what the old one did. The short of it is that a single Mnogo INDEXER can't keep up with our CRAWLERS by an order of magnitude.
Knowing all this makes me wonder which problem Altavista is experiencing. Or maybe it's something entirely different holding them up. On the crawling side, if they are only crawling every 60 days, and have 600 million URLs in the database, then they are crawling 10 million URLs a day. If you crawl 10 million a day, at 15K a piece, then you are using about 15Mbps of bandwidth, which surely they have, right?
On the indexing side, not all your pages will update every time you visit them, which means you can just index the ones that changed. We see an update rate of about 60% (the new client shows this to the user, BTW) on pages that we crawled a few weeks ago. Given that they needed to insert/reinsert those pages, their database/engine would need to insert about 500 words per page, or 3 billion inserts a day total for all the pages that they indexed. Keep in mind that they may not be able to delete words located on a particular URL, because you'd need an index on URLs on the word table which can slow things down and get REALLY big.
If it's a crawling problem, then I suggest calling us.
I'd really hate to see Altavista go, they were my first choice until Google came along and started kicking ass.
Shamless plug, check out Grub!
...is its wide support of languages, including Elmer Fudd, Pig Latin, and other "languages". Who needs BabelFish? ;-)
Keep on killing AltaVista, and then when they get really desperate, pick up Babelfish for a song!
Now that they've got Deja under their umbrella, Babelfish is all Google needs to be...
Best.... Search Engine.... Ever!
~Philly
Google already has a snapshot of the page. It has to, in order for you to search its results, yes?
:)
Not in the least. Storing a page's contents in verbatim plaintext form is about the worst conceivable way to build a searchable database.
Oh, for Pete's sake...you must be a web designer. You know, customers needs are more important than webdorks' needs. Webdorks are not google's customers.
Wow, there's a first time for everything, I guess! Rest assured, nobody has EVER accused me of emphasizing design over content before today.
If you look at the extremely un-skillfully designed page referenced in my user info, you'll see a counter with close to 50,000 hits on it. That's neither a large nor a small number of hits for a personal geek page like mine, but the point I was implying earlier still stands. Namely, if I'd managed to accumulate only 5,000 hits over two years, do you think I'd bother adding any more content to that page?
Well, the Google cache makes that very scenario a distinct possibility. If 50,000 people are interested in my page for whatever reason, but I see only 10% of this level of interest reflected in page views, that's a problem, both for me and for the people who were following my various projects by surfing the Google cache.
Buzzword alert! Buzzword alert! Danger! Danger!
"Syndication" is not a buzzword. The concept of distributing content through multiple independent outlets is nothing new. That's exactly what the Google cache is starting to do, whether or not you (and they) have thought through all of the implications.
Yaknow, there's more to life than pleasing web dorks at every possible turn. They tend to forget that, due to the ability to design they have
Trust me, I couldn't agree more!
Dahlmann tightly grips the knife, which he may have no idea how to use, and steps out into the plain.
--Rick
--Rick "If it isn't broken, take it apart and find out why."
Yes, old indexes are bad, but Altavista has another, rather more serious problem: it doesn't yield very useful searches, because it's susceptible to spamming. Of course, if you never tried anything better than Altavista, you are used to roommage among the junk an Altavista search produces, but I am now spoiled: Google is so much better at filtering out the stupid porn sites. Also, Google is able (with some magic or AI) to sort the pages by actual relevance: I usually find spot on the first page Google finds. With Altavista, that's almost never the case.
Google spoled me so badly that I now avoid by all means using any other search engine, it's THE standard by which I judge all the other search systems. Altavista doesn't come close.
Sigged!
You can do this in Google, as follows: Signetics "write only memory" -"jargon file"
The phrase search using double quotes works fine for me. I have no idea why it isn't for you. I also get more hits for the same queries than you.
Note that Google can include results for which the query words only appear in links pointing to that page, not on the page itself. You can verify that by viewing the cached entries, where it tells you exactly where the query words appear.
Funny I saw an article about this on infoworld last monday... I guess slashdot can't keep up with the pace ;-) I'm sure the article is cached somewhere on google :-O
TastesLikeHerringFlavoredChicken
TastesLikeHerringFlavoredChicken
More importantly... I also use Google to test my client's internet connections... If that baby doesn't come up within seconds (99% of the time), I know I have a problem to fix :)
Gravity!... It's not just a good idea... It's the Law!
It's only a matter of time before Google will be forced to "sell out" to stay in business. That being said, Google is one of the few dot coms I'd be wiling to pay a small monthly subscription.
Altavista was the first powerful internet crawler and indexation engine. There were some other (Yahoo...) but most submission were manual, and AV had far more entries when it was launched. ... Like many other sysadmin, I wrote to root@digital.com to complain... 2 months later, AV was born.
I can remember, some times ago, when ports 80 of all my subnet were scanned by a machine from digital.com
Sure, today, AV can't compete with Google. I'm not especially talking about the search engine itself. But AV web pages are bloated by tons of ads, and it's really lousy to use nowadays.
But maybe internet would never had a lot of powerful engine without AV. It was the seed (and it saved Digital, too... without this fantastic demo, Digital was about to go bankrupt) .
This is just like Netscape. Nowadays, everyone says that Netscape sucks, and that their browser is a crappy bugs collection. True. But with its so criticized "proprietary" HTML extensions, Netscape made web pages way better than before. Remember how ugly were Chimera and Mosaic? Remember how Netscape 3 kicked ass? And who introduced Javascript and Java first?
So, even if some companies/services have been obsoleted by their competitors, we should thank them for what the piece of technology they brang to everyone, and we should give them eternal respect.
{{.sig}}
Altavista is tubing because they no longer have DEC's Eastern Research, Western Research, and Network System Labs behind them. It things had been different and DEC didn't get bought by Compaq which then sold Altavista, a lot of ideas like those used in Google might have become part of Altavista.
Before Altavista the search engine became popular I worked for the group that was about to become Altavista the software company, productizing the fruits of the Labs. Amusingly I had just discovered Lycos at the time, when it was lycos.cs.cmu.edu or something like that.
The original business model for the Altavista search engine (although there was disagreement on the idea at many levels) was to basically be an ad for Altavista the software company, which sold Firewalls, VPN and collaboration software as well as an "Intranet" version of the search engine. Just like Google.
It didn't work. Pity.
That's my site that pops up at the TOP of Google.
Anyone else get to the top using three keywords or less?
Googles top site for a topic - better brag than a Cray in the basement.
Anarchists never rule
What is wrong with the MSNBC reporter??? Why didn't they ask the most obvious question of all???
WHY is AltaVista behind in refreshing their link databases?
This is AV's lifeblood. I can make assumptions about AV having enough financial and infrastructural problems to delay upgrading its value content. But you always get the statement from the official press flak. (If only to gleen truth from spin. Sometimes they even tell the truth.)
These are the journalists you're counting on for information about products, and accurate information concerning anthrax, terrorism, Al Queda, and our government's policies.
There is no America. There is no democracy. There is only IBM and AT&T and DuPont, Dow, General Electric, and Exxon
Ahhh.. One of the most useful sites on the web. If a crack can't be found there, give up and pay the licence...
Hmm, what I'm seeing is a company trying to out-smart itself. People want a search engine - not another market place. People want somewhere to get results to their queries not sponsered - more or less irrelevant - links to Altavista partners.
Enter Google.
Exit Altavista users.
End Altavista drive to improve engine/site?
Chimbis
Why not just use google
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
Looks like you slashdoted yourself right and proper.
(God do I hate this 20 second rule. You can't be informative in one sentance, then you're a moron)
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
alltheweb.com Let's you search the web, ftp files, images, MP3s and Videos. The results are quite good though not as good as in google. It has support for more languages than google and I use it exclusively to search pages written in my native language(which isn't supported in google). Has the best ftp search.
ResearchIndex Nice scientific literature search engine. Lets you search not only documents but also citations. Keeps cached copies of the documents in multiple formats. Can show related documents or other documents viewed by users that viewed the current document.
vivisimo.com Groups the found documents by topics and subtopics. Nice interface and the sudgested topics are quite reasonable.
www.wisenut.com Similar to vivisimo, but vivisimo(IMO) is beter.
www.searchshots.com Lets you see screenshot of the found pages. Too bad has a content filter and the results are not very good.
www.teoma.com Simple interface. Can group the results by their topic.
ditto.com An image search engine.
webshots.com Not exactly an image search engine. But I've had much better luck finding images there than in any image search engine. Requires you to download a program (windows only) that puts the images as a wallpaper.
But nobody here mentioned google groups. Google acquired deja.com and made it much more usable. I'm using it now instead of looking for free news server.
Well.
It's back up now. But crikey...my poor little server...
Call me dumb, but I for one just started using Google because everyone was saying how good it was, how clever it was, yada yada yada. Then I just stuck to it.
I think there might be a lot of people like me. I couldn't tell you whether Google's really better; but you must admit it was well-marketed.
I don't like Google's packaged responses either. I want a search, not a consumer profile.
Have you tried the Google translator?
Seems to work fine for me...
Information wants to be beer.
IMHO, Altavista's ugly b1tch-4ss monster of an interface is the cause of its own demise...
If they would have left it just as clean as Google, a lot of users who have jumped ship to google.com now would still be using altavista, simply because it works for them..
It was probably some dumb manager who thought it might be a good idea to make altavista just as bulky as all the other ugly portals such as yahoo.com...
It's worth noting that Yandex, the tzar of Russian Internet search has, apart from the main portal-like facade, got a search-only back entry, which is the prettiest minimalistic search page i've ever seen.
My exception safety is -fno-exceptions.
I changed my Altavista bookmarks to http://www.altavista.com/sites/search/text yonks ago when they started with all the graphics stuff.
Still prefer Google's results, but Altavista delivers better with complex searches.
While I occasionally miss complex operators in Google, the text snippets shown with search results in bold generally give me the answer right away.
I love the snippets and hit highlighting, and am encouraging all the site search developers I know to add these features. Great for end-user satisfaction!