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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.
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
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).
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
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 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.