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Google's Weakness, AltaVista's Strength
Some people love the results they get at Google, others are often disappointed. To a large extent, both the pluses and the minuses derive from Google's ranking system, which (as the folks at Google explain www.google.com/technology) depends largely on the number links to a particular page and the relevance of the content on those linking pages to the content on the target page, and the quality of the pages doing the linking.
Thanks to that complex and brilliant system, over time, the best pages often rise to the top of search lists. But that takes time -- a lot of time.
It works great for old, established sites to which many other old, established sites have linked. (It works great for my site :-) www.samizdat.com ). But new sites, regardless of the quality of their content, get short shrift. It takes 2-3 months for the new pages to get into the Google index. Then it takes time -- perhaps years -- for other "important" sites to discover the new site and link to it; and then months more for the new versions of those pages with those new links to get into the Google index.
So if I'm looking for content that is likely to have been on the Internet for a year or more, Google is great. But if I'm looking for fresh content, I'll go elsewhere.
For me, for years "elsewhere" meant AltaVista -- for two reasons. AltaVista used to add new pages to its index, for free, within two days of submission, while other search engines typically took weeks or even months. That meant they had the freshest content. In addition, AltaVista provided you with a set of very precise commands that couldn't be matched anywhere else.
Over the last year, as AltaVista has struggled to become profitable, they have destroyed their beautiful free submission process, trying to force Web sites to pay for submission. Free submissions (which typically come from the kinds of content-rich sites that I'm interested in) now seem to take three months or more -- no better than the other search engines and often worse.
Fortunately, the powerful commands remain -- for instance, the ability to exclude as well as include terms in your query. AltaVista lets you use minus signs and plus signs to indicate what you really don't want and what you do want. And for some specialized searches the exclusion is essential.
For instance, say you want to know what Web pages outside of your own site have links to your pages. At Google, I can do a search for link:samizdat.com or get the same results by going to their "Advanced" search and using their "page specific search" to find pages that link to a particular page. But my results are then littered with pages from my own site -- information I don't need and don't want. At AltaVista, I can search for +link:samizdat.com -host:samizdat.com and get exactly what I want -- finding out who thinks enough of my pages to have linked to me without my having contacted them: a valuable list of well-wishers and potential partners.
Similarly, Google lets me restrict a search to a particular Web site. For instance, if I include in my query the term site:samizdat.com or in Advanced search under Domains I choose to restrict the search to that domain, Yes, I get results only from that site. But to use that command, I need to have additional query terms: site:samizdat.com alone generates no results.
At AltaVista, however, I can search for host:samizdat.com and get a complete list of all the pages at my site that are in the AltaVista index. Or I can search for url:samizdat.com/isyn and get a list of all the pages in that directory at my site are in the AltaVista index. Or I can search for url:samizdat.com/consult.html to see if that particular page is in the index.
In other words, AltaVista provides a higher level of precision and the ability to get information that is particularly valuable to people in charge of Web sites and Web-based marketing projects. And if they'd just fix their free submission process and provide the service they used to, they'd kick Google's ass for searches for current information.
P.S. -- The folks at Google are very proud that their system defies human tampering. In fact, what they've done is encouraged the development of bizarre business models structured to take advantage of their link-based ranking system. For instance, Webseed Publishing now has over 1000 sites, all with different domain names. These content-rich sites are each run by different dedicated individuals. (I'm one of them :-) In many cases, the content deserves high rankings for its quality. You might wonder why the umbrella business for all these sites bothers to maintain over a thousand different domain names, when it would be far simpler and cheaper to have them as directories under a single domain. But because the domains are different, the many thousands of links these sites have to one another all count toward the automated calculation of their popularity and quality at Google, giving them all a boost in the rankings and hence bringing Webseed more traffic and hence more revenue.
P.P.S. -- AltaVista appears to be making a comeback. Six years ago, when I was in the Internet Business Group at Digital and Digital owned AltaVista, about a third of the traffic to my Web site came by way of AltaVista. Whenever AltaVista had a glitch, I saw it immediately in my traffic stats. In fact, I sometimes was able to alert the engineers at AltaVista about problems before they had noticed them themselves. Over the years, due to increased competition from other search engines and also due to the business folks at AltaVista making bad decisions and jettisoning great capabilities/services (like 2-day free submissions, their affiliate program, LiveTopics, and newsgroup search), the number of people finding my pages by way of AltaVista plummeted. By January 2002, only 1% of my traffic was coming by way of AltaVista, despite the fact that as a long-standing fan and also as co-author of the book The AltaVista Search Revolution, I had lots of information about AltaVista at my site. I was actually getting twice as much traffic from the International Atomic Energy Agency (part of the UN), when I had no information at all related to atomic energy. But in recent weeks the traffic from AltaVista has climbed sharply. It now amounts to 6% of my total. I wish I knew why that was happening. In any case, I hope that trend continues.
I'm amazed, an entire article astroturfing AltaVista. Sadly, the author is a bit short-sighted, and doesn't realize how quickly stuff appears in Google's cache (often within weeks, less than a month), or that even if something accidentally ranked lower because of the number of links a given page receives, it still ends up in the first page or two anyway. *Sigh*
Whenever Google results have been disappointing, I hop over to AltaVista and search there.
For me, Google doesn't have to be the perfect search engine - it's already enough. I type in google.com and it loads damn near instantly. There's no annoying advertisements, and I can search in h4x0r or Sveedish Chef, bork bork bork.
If I can't find what I want on Google, fine, I'll use another engine. And what's wrong with that? We honestly can't have too many search engines (Well, business problems aside), because each one ends up with different ranking systems, different data pulled up from queries, etc.
.. are you suggesting that different goals require different tools, possibly made by different companies? Don't let the OS market know this, or we will kill the thriving flamebait OS war scene. :(
Actually, there is lots of good information you provide on the capabilities of search engines. I, for one, would love to see more "A is good for this, B is good for this", instead of simply grouping and competing A & B, suggesting that one can only use one.
IMHO, this is where (free) web services really rule - I can't buy 5 different cars for 5 different reasons I use cars, but in the case of these types of services, the cost of using and switching between these services is very next-to-nil. Hopefully, web services will start encouraging companies to share again, as Google and Altavista may very well demonstrate that sharing market segments with other players makes everyone happier in the long run.
"Old man yells at systemd"
Now it took months to get into DMOZ, but we did. Yahoo - still hasn't accepted us into our proepr catagory even after 2 or 3 tries over a year and a half.
I think Google could benefit by adding some more advanced filtering command slike Altavista has - I agree they are nice. But the bottom line is, for obscure sites, once you get in Google, look out. Months later we finally got into the other mainstream search indexes (we submitted to them all at the same time) and in teh end Google is THE place for referrals. By orders of magnitude. YMMV, but it seems the other search indexes blew it when tehy killed free submits since folks knwo that they will only return paid sites (plus rank skewring, for $$$, etc)
Only time will tell, but I use Google daily and am happy with the results and performance - no other search engine comes close IMHO
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Altavista used to be my search engine of choice, but I gradually abandoned it around 3-4 years ago - shortly after it was spun off from DEC I noticed a general decline in quality.
./ today is that they are being done in an organized fashion by intelligent (and somewhat witty) people. I agree that there is significant potential for Google-bombing to be exploited for commercial gain in the coming years. But I don't think it can nearly as bad as some of the awful stuff that's done with meta tags. I'm sticking with Google (for now) because it is still lightning fast and doesn't put a bunch of crap up on my screen.
The one thing I've noticed about these "flaws" in Google "exposed" on
i wish more sites would develop tool bars similar to google... it is extremely convienient.
on all my windows boxes it is one of the first things i install.
google is probably the best search tool right now, and they make using it a breeze. altavista used to be the best search tool, but they made it harder and harder to use, and then search tool lost its top spot. totally different situation. if google looses its top spot in the search tool field, i'll still use it for its ease of use.
MARIJUANA, SHROOMS, X: ONLINE?! - E
Perhaps AltaVista is indeed better (or used to be, as the author points out) at indexing new content, but I'd never know, as I have been using Google exclusively almost since its public debut. However, I think that this point will become less and less important.
Yes, it's true that Google's algorithm prevents new content from being ranked high, because no one has linked to it yet necessarily, but that's by design - it is indeed at that point unproven in terms of quality. However, the spidering process can use improvement so that when many many people link to this new site just a few days later, it now ranks higher.
Google specifically mentions (in previous interviews I read with employees) that they're always working on updating the speed, as well as the precision. The longterm goal is to significantly decrease the amount of time it takes to respider everything, and therefore make the info more relevant faster. I trust that they will continue to improve, and eventually this differentiation between "Altavista is better for new stuff, Google for old" will go away completely.
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Boolean mumbo-jumbo? That's the best PART of AltaVista. Google limits querys to 10 words? That stinks! Google is great for simple querys about common subjects. AltaVista's boolean query is great for finding that site whose link you can't remember but you remember some of the words that were close together. AltaVista's boolean query is great for finding information on little-known subjects that you can pretty well guess what keywords will be near each other. I used to use AltaVista's boolean query exclusively. Now, I find it's best to try both AltaVista and Google. Each find content the other won't.
Of course you can find things with search engines now. Google's "trick" of counting links helps a little bit for a particular class of query, which is when you know the name of an organization and you want to find its site...it works well because more people will link to the site as opposed to other sites that discuss it. But as I have written elsewhere, if AltaVista is 99% lame, then maybe Google is only 97% lame...which is three times better, but still terrible if you take a step back.
Now Google is doing a lot of good things outside from its basic search engine, which should be applauded. The caches, saving old Usenet posts, the image and catalog searches, etc. are all good things -- but they don't affect its basic ability to search well.
Further karma ho' expounding can be found right here.
- adam
Check out www.raging.com. Altavista search; nothing but text.
Living better through chemicals
After reading this article, tons of /.'ers are now hitting altavista and doing a
:) (myself included) :)
+link:mysite.com -host:mysite.com
to see how many people have linked to them
"Just tell him ya did it! That's what he wants to hear anyway..."
Sure I go to AltaVista and others after hitting a brick wall with Google but that is very rare for me. Perhaps the issue is when I do searches I am looking for info on technical issues usually revolving around compiling this or that GNU package or Service.
_ __
No tool is the best tool for every purpose and perhaps many people should give other search engines a try and see the strengths.
However, I don't really see that point of an article that is simply a Hoorah for one service over another with differing models of profit and aims.
The author had simply pointed out that AltaVista as opposed to other search engines has advanced searching abilities including the ability to exclude terms. No, it has to be an AltaVista over Google article.
Different tools for different times and different uses.
_______________________________________________
ACK
If it wasn't for the "I'm feeling lucky" button then some day's I'd have no luck at all.
I've hit Karma 50 and gotten a Score:5, Troll... I win!
Google has exclusions, site and link queries too.
See http://www.google.com/help/refinesearch.html
... because it is so good.
...
I'm a librarian. It is the most difficult time in history to do library research. There are hundreds of overlapping commercial databases out there, each with their own coverage, interface, and search engines.
Students used to locating information with Google are appalled at the steps it takes to locate a scholarly journal. You need to browse a list of subject databases, search them, then locate a printed copy of the journal via our catalog (a growing but still small percent of journals are available online).
Someday searching the various literary databases may be as easy as Google, but in the meantime there are drastic capitalist impediments to making it easy to do library research.
... so ask a Librarian if you ever need help
Go here.
Nope, no sig
...but you can also make Google pop up when you click the "Search" button in IE. This makes Google searching even easier since you can have the search window open on the left and hit your search results on the right. (Yay for "tabbed browsing", IE style.)
Also, the coolest feature of the Google toolbar IMHO is not even the instant search, but the "Highlight" button. Gone forever is hitting Ctrl-F and typing in a search term. Just search for something in Google, go to a result, and hit "Highlight" -- the search terms are instantly highlighted. This saves me an incredible amount of time when I'm searching through, say, mailing list archives.
The Google toolbar is one of the biggest reasons I use IE. (Well, that and the fact that page developers, including myself, follow the rule of thumb "Design so that it looks good in IE and works in Netscape.") But anyway, I digress. If you're using IE, check out toolbar.google.com and download it.
Simpli - Your source for San Jose dedicated servers and colocation!
I would like to see a program and specification that dictates a formal data format for information in a mathematical schema. This could be the foundation for a universal translator and certainly a decent means of doing a search engine.
The idea is pretty simplistic, although the implementation is complex.
Any communication takes place by translating an idea into a sensory input form.
Examples: Sight (written language, video, sign-language), Touch (brail, texture), Sound (conversation, music), Taste (Like water for chocolate?), Smell (pheromones?).
Obviously, not all of these mediums are easy to work with, but we can certainly start with written language.
All languages use the same basic principle: convey relevant information about a central subject. How they go about doing it is different even between versions of the same language (British English vs. American English).
If we described an objective hierarchy of physical objects described by pure mathematics and implanted them into a central, world-wide database then open-source parsers for each language could handle the task of translating any written text, in any supported language, into this common language. If correctly implemented a search engine could enter into a short dialogue with a person performing a search and then return information very specifically relevant to what the user was searching for.
Example dialogue:
[user]I want information on Mary Jane Carpenter.
[google]There is a very famous person by that name. Her official website is [here]. [Here] is a list of fansites and [here] are some other sites which discuss her. That name is mentioned in [these] sites, but it is unclear if they are talking about the same person. [Here] is a list of other people with that name.
[user]The person I am looking for isn't famous.
[google]Then you are probably looking for one of [these] people.
[user] Are any of those people from St. Lewis?
[google] [Here] is a sight dedicated to a Mary Jane Carpenter from St. Lewis.
This may sound like an impossible streatch but it really isn't. The famous Mary Jane Carpenter has a unique id on her object and many thousands of attributes which uniquely identify it from any other Mary Jane Carpenters. Ambiguity is dictated by the same rules that govern conversation: context.
If I have a page that contains no content other than Mary Jane Carpenter sucks! then a simple fuzzy logic routine should be able to infer that the Mary Jane Carpenter I am talking about is probably the famous one. Other clues could be gained from other parts of my site or other documents which have me as a source.
I realize that I am talking about a HUGE database, but it sure would be handy...
My $0.02 will always be worth more than your â0.02, so
And that is that I sometimes NEED to use the near keyword in altavista to get a complex search to work correctly. If google added the near keyword I would get rid of my quicklink bar entry for altavista's advanced search.
p.s.
the advanced search page is all text, not even a banner ad so it's almost faster than google to load.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
Similarly, Google lets me restrict a search to a particular Web site. For instance, if I include in my query the term site:samizdat.com or in Advanced search under Domains I choose to restrict the search to that domain, Yes, I get results only from that site. But to use that command, I need to have additional query terms: site:samizdat.com alone generates no results.
You can use the following workaround to do a site: search on google without any keywords. Just do "site:yoursite.com -stuff" where stuff is gibberish (bang on the keyboard a bit). For example, this search shows 1,290 pages from samizsat.com. On the other hand, an altavista search for that site shows 1,090 hits for pages on that site.
I don't know why Google doesn't allow simultaneous "site:" and "link:" searching, as that is something many users would like to do.
Holy shit! That guy got to plug his website NINE TIMES in an article. I can't imagine how much he had to pay for exposure like that. Next we'll be seeing ads like this:
Features: ICMP echo requests are 37337!
Posted by CmdrTaco on 03:35 PM -- Wednesday March 13 2002
from the leet-nettools-impress-chicks dept.
Hey, Slashdotters! I just found this 37337 tool called pign. You can use it to send an ICMP echo request to IBM.COM. You just type "ping ibm.com"...
And it pings IBM.COM! Check it out:
>ping ibm.com
Pinging www.ibm.com [129.42.17.99] with 32 bytes of data:
Reply from ibm.com : bytes 32 time 80ms TTL=128
Reply from ibm.com : bytes 32 time 80ms TTL=128
Reply from ibm.com : bytes 32 time 80ms TTL=128
Reply from ibm.com : bytes 32 time 80ms TTL=128
Reply from ibm.com : bytes 32 time 80ms TTL=128
Reply from ibm.com : bytes 32 time 80ms TTL=128
Reply from ibm.com : bytes 32 time 80ms TTL=128
Reply from ibm.com : bytes 32 time 80ms TTL=128
Reply from ibm.com : bytes 32 time 80ms TTL=128
(Read more...)
Seriously -- I'm sure more curious people clicked over to samizdat.com than clicked on any of the other ads on the screen (thinkgeek and ibm for me). Maybe there is something to text ads on community sites (ala kuro5hin)
sm
Now I just don't see how AltaVista can give anyone more current results if their bots are featherbedding.
___
"with their freedom lost all virtue lose" - Milton
Just have all of the geocities pages link each other, too.
__
Do ya feel happy-go-lucky, punk?
What would you do if your best friend cuddles up with your biggest enemy?
It's alive.
Alas, they can no longer be reached. Their search engine is seriously broken. It picks on a site and hits it hard and repeatedly.
They will make 100,000 requests on a site with only 20,000 static items within 24 hours. On our co-operative co-loacted server, we host around 80 sites, many of which are content rich. When Alta Vista choose to visit just one of them, our total bandwidth usage jumps by an order of magnitude.
We have been unable to get past their front line support, I am not prepared to maintain robots.txt on all of our member's sites just to control their broken robot, so we had no alternative but to block their entire subnet at our firewall.
If anyone has evidence that the AV robot is fixed, I'd be happy to let them back in.
Read the excellent information Google has provided about how the engine works, and use the engine with its inner-workings in mind. When you meet the machine half-way instead of trying to dumb it down for the user, you'll get a hell of a lot more done.
In Google's case, taking half a minute to think about what you're looking for, then tossing in a few related bits of jargon or other words relevant to the context you're after does amazing things. With a little forethought, you can almost always find what you're after and be down to a page with nothing but relevant links with just an extra word or two added as filters.
According to http://www.leekillough.com/robots.html - iaea.org is commonly used as a fake referrer by spam harvesters.
My amazing wife - Artist, Author, Philosopher - Laurie M
The author is basing this on outdated information. Google knows to crawl sites that change frequently more often than those that don't. Here is a concrete example:
I posted Two Kinds of Order by John Marks on March 11th, and mentioned this to some colleagues who might be interested. I linked to it from a Weblog or two,and Doc Searls did too.
Today it is number 1 on a search for 'two kinds of order' out of over 2 million, and a search for John Marks brings the page up in 5th position, despite there being lots of other John Marks's on the net.
Thats what I call fast (and relevant)
As it was over-explained, Google ranks pages according to how many links elsewhere points to that page.
:D
Remember this post from Slashdot ? It is about Macromedia wanting Flash to be used to design the entirety of a site.
So, I don't suppose Google can fetch the URLS inside a Flash file (correct me If I'm wrong), so, if Macromedia's dream become true, how would Google cope with it?
BTW, how any search engine would deal with such a catastrophe?
Cheers.
The point of the original article was hidden in the last few paragraphs. He was making a point about various government's attempts at universal surveilance, i.e. attempting to log all packet traffic, etc...
His discussion of web search techniques was to illustrate the nature of the problem these would be omnisicents face. Because the data they collect does not have the richly linked nature of web content, all that these governments government entities will be left with is mountains of meaningless data. They will be stuck using AltaVista like searching and matching techniques.
And we all know how useful Altavista is these days.
-josh
check out lsdie : unformed.hypermar.net
(i wrote it)
it's for ie, it installs a little bar like the IE Search bar but a lot smaller, and no ads, and has support for selecting among about 20 different search engines, easily selectable in a convenient interface....
Sounds good! Why don't you enter the Google programming contest? This idea would be interesting to implement, even if in testbed conditions. Incidentally, Teoma (or Vivisimo -- forget which) already offers something like this, though not on the scale you outline (they have "topic clusters").
While you are right about people stressing the wrong differences, your claim about AV and Google's respective syntaxes being interchangable is false.
In AV's simple syntax, unadorned terms are not required to be in the results, they are only preferred. If you want to require a term, you must prepend a plus sign. Google does not allow you to distinguish between required and preferred terms. This may arguably be simpler, but it takes away control from you, the user.
AV also offers a separate advanced syntax which provides support for nested booleans, and positional operators like "near", "within", "before", and "after". Google, while it allows a single level of simple booleans, does not provide any means by which to nest them. It completely lacks positional operators other than phrase matching. Again this takes control away from you, the user.
It never fails to mystify me why Slashdot readers, a crowd biased strongly towards programmers, engineers, and Unix users, namely people who love to have lots of control over things, would favor a dumbed down search service! (I agree that there are other problems with AltaVista, such as the annoying popunder ads. However, these have nothing to do with the quality of its search syntax.)
But my grandest creation, as history will tell,
Was Firefrorefiddle, the Fiend of the Fell.
the first time I saw googlebots in my access logs i nearly fell over, we hadn't asked anyone to index our site.
but I have to admite to being very impressed, every month the googlebots come to visit, they don't disrupt the site (the National Library of Australia hit us with a denial of service attack called "Pandora" when they tried to suck down the enitre site in one go, complete with recursing loops), and they rank us very highly (perhaps too highly, there are more authoritative sites in our region, we do more comment).
anyway I suspect the author forgot that most users of search engines aren't website owners hoping to be indexed, but people doing searches.
Sites that have been regularly updated for a couple of years tend to be a better source of information than those slapped up yesterday.
'There is a Light that never goes out.'