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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.
can't make $$$ off a search engine can you?
"You done taken a wrong turn."
-Bill McKinney, in Deliverance
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?
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.
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
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.
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).
Google also allows this. Go to http://www.google.com/advanced_search and look near the bottom of the page.
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.
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, 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.
As did I, many moons ago. I'd forgotten Altavista even existed.
At least Astalavista is still useful.
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?
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
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.
I recognize this is important from an indexing and performance point of view, but it makes some queries extremely difficult.
For instance, how would you search for the source of the quotation "Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of their party"? That'll get cut down to "now time good men come aid party", and while I can think of a lot of web sites that might appear as a result of such a query, about 99% of them will probably not be what I'm looking for.
The problem is particularly annoying when you're looking for things like song lyrics. (Curse you, Harry Fox, may you rot in hell for eternity for what you pigfuckers did to lyrics.ch.)
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.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.
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
+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.
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.
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
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
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
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.
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 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.
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.
Excellent! They've added quite a few features since the last time I checked. The whole threading tree on the left-hand side is new to me too.
Okay, ignore my rant, then. :-)
You cannot apply a technological solution to a sociological problem. (Edwards' Law)
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
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
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.
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 ?
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.
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!
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}}
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
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
I installed the IE toolbar for google at work... my homepage is /.!
Whatever happened to JonKatz?
OK, so it has been pointed out that you can get what you really want with judicious use of "+" terms in the original search. But you know what? There's no reason why Google couldn't do that for you if it knew you were really searching for a quote or an exact phrase. So I therefore predict that that Google will develop a special "quotes" section like they already have for "groups" and "images". Or maybe just a search directive like "quote:" (cf some of the special forms used in google groups).
I mean, people whine about this a lot now, so it something that should get fixed. And Google does tend to fix what's broken.
Babar