Altavista Renewed

Waterlooppln77 writes "Altavista has recently changed their searchengine to allow more competition with Google.com. It offers a whole set of new features, like searching through PDF documents, and more importantly got rid of the commercial portal thingie." Anyone remember when Alta Vista was the best search engine?

Comments

RE: Oh joy.

[fshalor]

Any word on whether the're also playing nice about which sites are displayed first?

I remember when it was the best...

[SexyKellyOsbourne]

But after google, the only redeeming feature it had was babelfish -- and now google translates webpages better, too.

Altavista became way too bloated and way too commercial, and it will wither and die away within 5 years. Everything it does, google does, but without the sense of bloat or loading 200k webpages full of ads.

Re:I remember when it was the best...

[Jugalator]

But after google, the only redeeming feature it had was babelfish -- and now google translates webpages better, too.

Wow, thanks for the heads up! :)

Re:I remember when it was the best...

[ergo98]

Altavista became way too bloated and way too commercial, and it will wither and die away within 5 years. Everything it does, google does, but without the sense of bloat or loading 200k webpages full of ads.

3 years ago you would have been saying that X was going to whither away and die because everything it did, AltaVista did better. In case you haven't noticed, Google hit the point where they decided that not losing money would be wise, and they've started to fill up on advertisements. For all we know Google might be 2MB of Flashvertisements in a years time.

Personally I'm willing to use whatever service offers me the best search results. Whether someone develops a new CredibilityRank(TM - Patent Pending) system that eliminates the garbage, or a phonetic search for the chronic misspellings that plague the net, I'd switch in a heartbeat.

Re:I remember when it was the best...

[Mwongozi]

Google and BabelFish both use the SysTran engine for translation, and should both come up with the same results.

However, BabelFish translates Japanese, and Google doesn't.

Re:I remember when it was the best...

[P-Nuts]

Whether someone develops a new CredibilityRank(TM - Patent Pending) system that eliminates the garbage, or a phonetic search for the chronic misspellings that plague the net, I'd switch in a heartbeat.

I'd settle for a search engine that could handle regular expressions. The differences between UK and US English spellings can be a problem.

Also, non alphanumeric characters are often not indexed very well, which hurts when one searches on an arcane error message.

Re:I remember when it was the best...

[Reziac]

Likewise -- I use the search engine that most often returns results relevant to whatever *I* am searching for. Until about a year ago, that was Hotbot (text-only version). Now it's Google. Next year it may be someone else.

Tho I have to agree with the long review someone posted up above -- Altavista came up slow (a good 10 seconds just for the search page to display?!) and returned results slowly. On a search where I know very well what results should come up, Google finds nearly all the pages, AV finds less than 20% of them (180 vs 29). Tho to be fair, AV did cough up a couple that Google missed.

Re:I remember when it was the best...

[spike hay]

Google hit the point where they decided that not losing money would be wise, and they've started to fill up on advertisements.

Google needs to make money. How do you think they pay for all of their bandwidth? Anyway, the only ads they have are unobtrusive text ads. That's great, considering that advertising everywhere else on the net is getting worse and worse every day, with popups and animated ads. I can't see how anyone can complain about Google's advertisements.

Also, Google will never get flashvertisements or anything of that sort. They know one of the main reasons people use their site is the clean interface with no annoying ads. They won't abandon that. They're making a very good profit just the way it is.

Re:I remember when it was the best...

[jpt.d]

Which is why we use Sherlock 3.

A list of languages that will surely blow away google and babelfish: (and it does use the systran engine too).

Dutch
Chinese Traditional and Simplified
French
German
Greek
Italian
Japanese
Korean
Portugese
Russian
Spanish

The only language that might be useful (to me, that is missing) is Latin.

Re:I remember when it was the best...

[rjamestaylor]

I remember when AltaVista was the best. I also remember when AOL allowed its users, with special permission, to search using Gopher and Archie; later it allowed access to a thing called the WWW.

I haven't used AOL since 1994 when I found direct ISP service and I haven't used AltaVista since 1999 when I found Google.

Re:I remember when it was the best...

[ergo98]

Google needs to make money. How do you think they pay for all of their bandwidth?

Why so defensive about Google? Indeed, why are so many on Slashdot so defensive about Google in general? It's a search engine with people looking to make a buck somehow -- It isn't a benevolent charity. I'm not saying it's a BAD thing that they've decided to get some income: I expect them to make money. Let's face it though: Google became prominent basically for doing what Microsoft gets slammed for (at least in the case of IE): They ate costs to get marketshare, and it worked beautifully. The number one reason that most people went to Google in the nascent years was the absolute lack of ads.

Also, Google will never get flashvertisements or anything of that sort. They know one of the main reasons people use their site is the clean interface with no annoying ads. They won't abandon that. They're making a very good profit just the way it is.

And you know this how? I like Google. I use Google exclusively for searching. I've used Google for years. However I don't love Google, and I owe them no loyalty outside of what they earn day to day by having the best search engine.

Re:I remember when it was the best...

[Anonymous Coward]

Why so defensive about Google?

Why so critical about Google?

Google became prominent basically for doing what Microsoft gets slammed for (at least in the case of IE): They ate costs to get marketshare, and it worked beautifully. The number one reason that most people went to Google in the nascent years was the absolute lack of ads

Google relased a browser/OS to crush other search engines by making it hard for people to use other search engines? Oh wait, they didn't. People *choose* to use Google, and remember, by default, many IE users have their home pages set to MSN and MSN Search. Google has had ads for a long time now. First they had those bigger, very expensive ads, then they added AdWords. And through this all, Google's gotten MORE popular. Google also makes money selling their technology to other companies.

I like Google. I use Google exclusively for searching.

Wow, someone so critical uses it exclusively? Me, I *love* Google, but even I will use other search engines on occasion if I'm not getting what I'm looking for.

It's very easy for people to change which search engine they use, much easier than changing an OS or even a web browser. Google doesn't hold a gun to anyone's head. People like you CHOOSE to use it (and exclusively!), then complain when it's too popular and has "too much power."

Re:I remember when it was the best...

[Daniel Dvorkin]

I'd settle for a search engine that could handle regular expressions. The differences between UK and US English spellings can be a problem.

Yeah, that would be nice. You can kind of fake it with Booleans like "... AND (color OR colour) AND ..." but it would be nice not to have to.

If any search engine ever implements regexps, I'll bet it'll be Google.

Re:I remember when it was the best...

[ergo98]

Google relased a browser/OS to crush other search engines by making it hard for people to use other search engines?

Oh, right, IE stops me from installing Mozilla or Opera. Hey, wait, it must not be working because I have those installed. Weird.

Wow, someone so critical uses it exclusively?

Yes, you can clearly see that I'm incredibly critical of Google. I mean look where I said...uh...oh...uh... wait, no I wasn't critical of Google. Lay off the Google love. Are you a Google's Gate cult member? I suspect so.

It's very easy for people to change which search engine they use, much easier than changing an OS or even a web browser. Google doesn't hold a gun to anyone's head. People like you CHOOSE to use it (and exclusively!), then complain when it's too popular and has "too much power."

Oh yes, you can clearly see where I said that it's too popular. I can't seem to find that right now, so would you mind quoting where I said that? Oh, right, I didn't and you're just a raving Google's Gate member looking to smote all those who dare say anything but pure accolades for your deity.

Re:I remember when it was the best...

[deadmongrel]

i am really surprised that altavista is still alive. I still rememeber when altavista was number 1 search engine few years. I still don't remember how exactly it lost its popularity but i guess google had better search algorithm and the success of google is also because of its simplicity.
would i use altavista instead of google? its tough to answer but i am going to give altavista another chance....

Re:I remember when it was the best...

[Shelled]

Google needs to make money.

You beg the question, phrasing it as if distorting the rankings is the only way a search engine can make money. Look at their site under 'Services and Tools', they're primarily a software development firm and make money by selling custom search solutions. The website was originally a showcase for demonstrating the power of their product.

Now Google may be choosing to move from a software-based business model to a search/advertisement business model, but that doesn't mean they weren't making money before or that it's a good move. It seems to me if their showcase continuously returns biased results, people will choose to use both the search engine and the software less. It certainly didn't work for Altavista.

Re:I remember when it was the best...

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh, right, IE stops me from installing Mozilla or Opera. Hey, wait, it must not be working because I have those installed. Weird.

As I pointed out, it's much easier to switch search engines than a browser or OS. So, you have multiple browsers installed. Great for you. Most people these days don't. Downloading a 5 or 10 meg file by modem is pretty slow for most people. It's the same reason many people don't upgrade IE 5 or 5.5 to 6.

Yes, you can clearly see that I'm incredibly critical of Google. I mean look where I said...uh...oh...uh... wait, no I wasn't critical of Google. Lay off the Google love. Are you a Google's Gate cult member? I suspect so.

I call this critical: Google became prominent basically for doing what Microsoft gets slammed for (at least in the case of IE): They ate costs to get marketshare, and it worked beautifully.

But, maybe comparing a company's business tactics to a company that was found guilty of violating numerous laws is a compliment in your mind? And Google's Gate? Is that some sort of bizarre insult? If you mean do I love Google? Yes, yes I do. I think I've been pretty clear about that.

Oh yes, you can clearly see where I said that it's too popular. I can't seem to find that right now, so would you mind quoting where I said that?

Pay attention:

1. YOUR quotes are in italics.
2. I said "people like you" not "you."

Re-read it and see if you can spot that pattern.

Re:I remember when it was the best...

[Thomas the Rhymer]

A coolt search engine is Kartoo http://www.kartoo.com. As well as hits it gives you a network of links, weak and strong and all sorts of other stuff. Looks purdy too. For those who saw the early version Kartoo has had a big makeover.

Re:I remember when it was the best...

[Linknoid]

I can't see how anyone can complain about Google's advertisements.

I agree, I like the way they handle ads. However, one thing about their ads, they recently added ads to google groups (USENET), and the way they're handled is strange. When browsing a specific group, it seems to take a random key word from the last message that was posted to that group, and bring up advertisers based on that. For example, in a game related forum, in response to request for information, someone answered the question and then mentioned checking the spoiler files. Somehow google picked up that single word, and I got three ads for hot rod spoilers. That's how the google groups ads seem to work in general, quite unrelated to anything in the newgroup. But other than that, their advertising seems quite appropriate.

Re:I remember when it was the best...

[Chester K]

Also, Google will never get flashvertisements or anything of that sort. They know one of the main reasons people use their site is the clean interface with no annoying ads. They won't abandon that. They're making a very good profit just the way it is.

Maybe. But then again, they also knew one of the main reason people use their site is the good quality of search results it gets, but that hasn't stopped them from making major changes to their ranking algorithms which have, in many cases, turned the results given to absolute garbage.

In addition they've recently begun exercising what appears to be editorial control over the sites in their index. A Google search for "something awful" doesn't bring up the popular site www.somethingawful.com anywhere in the results. Google unilaterally decided that the site shouldn't exist anymore, so they don't list it. And to this date, they haven't given a reason why.

So never say that Google won't do something because they know better; it's becoming more and more obvious every day that they're picking up the same bad habits that every other search engine company has picked up.

Re:I remember when it was the best...

[Anonymous Coward]

>Google and BabelFish both use the SysTran engine for translation, and should both come up with the same results.

A test to see if this is the truth...

Google's translation to german for "I am a donut": "Ich bin ein Schaumgummiring"
Altavista's translation to german for "I am a donut": "Ich bin ein Schaumgummiring"

Looks good there...

And back to english again:

Google: "I am a foam rubber ring"
Altavista: "I am a foam rubber ring"

Yup, they're not just the same, they're even bug for bug compatible. :-) BTW: What's the real german word for donut?

Re:I remember when it was the best...

[Anonymous Coward]

Try searching for somethingawful.com on both google and alta vista using SOMETHING AWFUL as your keywords.

Alta Vista will find the http://www.somethingawful.com/ site as one of the first three hits. Google will not show this site on their first FIVE PAGES of hits! Obviously Google is really doing something wrong. I am switching to AV.

Re:I remember when it was the best...

[Anonymous Coward]

I tried the something awful search at alta vista. Guess which page was first, right after the clearly marked sponsored link? That's right! somethingawful.com. Hmmm. Maybe it's time to switch search engines. I'm gonna try some more phrases! Whee this is soooo fun!

Re:I remember when it was the best...

[Anonymous Coward]

SexyKellyOsbourne, there are message(s) for you:

Fuck off

Die

Thank you for using (AC)MessengingService. Motto: From Troll to Troll

Re:I remember when it was the best...

[PurpleBob]

Look. It's this simple. They changed the freaking algorithm. This is something they're entitled to do more than your page is entitled to its rank.

I assume the reason they changed the algorithm is that "Search Engine Optimizers" (the layer of scum just above spammers) were getting the hang of manipulating Google. So they came up with something to dump sites which seemed to be doing that. And it seems they got some false positives, too.

And now everyone who thought they were l33t just because their page was on the top 10 for a certain search in Google is whining when they've lost their precious wittle rank.

It's a bizarre conspiracy theory. What possible reason would Google have to consciously decide to drop somethingawful.com, instead of their algorithm simply dropping it? Why would they have their employees spend time deliberately finding sites to screw over? Your hypothesis fails Occam's Razor.

Re:I remember when it was the best...

[Anonymous Coward]

From my experience with Babelfish's Japanese translation service, it is extremely poor, far worse than what we've come to expect from machine translation --- the results almost never make any kind of sense. Probably Google did not include it because it sucks so badly.

Re:I remember when it was the best...

[Chester K]

It's a bizarre conspiracy theory. What possible reason would Google have to consciously decide to drop somethingawful.com, instead of their algorithm simply dropping it? Why would they have their employees spend time deliberately finding sites to screw over? Your hypothesis fails Occam's Razor.

No, actually, it passes Occam's Razor quite easily. Given the symptom "The highly popular internet site somethingawful.com does not appear in Google's search results anywhere, not page 1, not page 10, not page 1000, which of the following is true..."

A) Google's new PageRank system for some reason decided not to index it at all.

or, B) Google is specifically blocking the site from its index.

B sounds like the simplest solution. Especially given that the first few pages of search results for the term are filled with pages that refer to the site itself, PageRank in any shape or form should at least index the site itself in some capacity.

But that's just one example of Google's downward slide in the quality department lately. There are plenty of other examples, such as a search for "reservation hotel". The number one match, the match that the trustworthly-until-recently "I'm Feeling Lucky" button would send you to is a blind link that goes nowhere relevant -- in fact, it seems like it's one that was specifically targetted to get search engine ranking under the old guard of search engines, your Altavista, your Excite, and what have you.

The biggest problem is that this is not uncommon anymore. The quality of Google's results has, by all accounts, taken a downturn recently. I'm not saying that it's not Google's perogative to change their algorithm as they see fit, and this is not some penis-size rant about my site's former PageRank (in fact my site's PageRank hasn't changed), but this is a rant about Google's tinkering turning them from the gold standard of searching into Just Another Search Engine. Alltheweb.com gives better results nowadays.

The problem is that Google threw the baby out with the bathwater. They had their guns aimed at the blogging community who were Googlebombing various (unpopular) search words. Sure, they've fixed that problem, but at what cost? At the cost of at least one user... I certainly don't rely on Google anymore. They've been shown to remove sites from their index silently and without any apparent reason, and their results aren't as good as they used to be.

Judge it however you'd like, your viewpoint on it is your decision in the end; all I can do is provide the evidence of Google's missteps that led me to my decision.

Re:I remember when it was the best...

[Hard_Code]

"look good and go down easy"

No wonder so many geeks are switching...

Re:I remember when it was the best...

[divbyzero]

A lesson from Search Engines 101:

Most search engines, including Google and AltaVista, are word-based reverse-indexes at heart. This is like the index at the back of a book; it is optimized for looking up a single word and getting back a list of pages in which the word occurs. It is prohibitively inefficient at looking for substrings which don't line up with word boundaries. Since this latter concept lies at the core of regular expressions, they are incompatible with reverse-indexes for all practical purposes. (Using only the index of a book, try to find all occurances of the regular expression ".*foo".) As such, don't expect to see them on AltaVista or Google all that soon.

Altavista the best?

[Anonymous Coward]

I can't say I do....

Re:Altavista the best?

[ergo98]

Then you must be new to the net. AltaVista (then owned by Digital) owned the search rankings for a while, and then Excite came on fairly strong and took the crown (Excite was actually a great site: They had a clean page, great results, and they did cute things like changing the graphics by the time of year, etc). Around that time the .COM bubble started expanding quickly, and both did some incredibly stupid things to try to capitalize on their positions: Becoming variations of Yahoo, or shopping hubs, etc. They squandered the market they exceled in to pursue what the VCs told them would be of value.

Of course around this time Google came on strong. Google's primary selling point, of course, was the cleanliness of the design and lack of advertisements.

Re:Altavista the best?

[scott1853]

It was back in the mid 90's.

As far as nostalgia goes, anybody remember back when InfoSeek actually charged for searches?

Re:Altavista the best?

[jazzbotley]

It's hard to believe that the commercialization and commoditization of the 'Net was less than ten years ago. When I graduated college in Spring 1994, I'd had an Internet email address for four years and preached the email revolution to my friends and relatives. About a year later, I stumbled across Barkakati's "Linux Secrets" and forayed into Slackware's distro (v 3.0!), one step at a time. It's fun to look back at my beginnings on the Internet vs. the Internet's beginnings (which precedes mine by decades) vs. the general public's exposure to the 'Net (when was that, 1996? Remember the term, information superhighway? Ugh!) All that, less than ten years ago. Look how far we've come!

Re:Altavista the best?

[Snork Asaurus]

Anyone remember when Alta Vista was the best search engine?

I certainly do, it was 5-6 years ago (~= 1 web lifetime). Then, as it started to descend into deep suckitude in the search of money rather than results, along came Google. I also remember when people used to use Yahoo and Lycos and a few others as search engines. IMO, Google is currently and still king of the hill, especially since it became less anal about including common words (the, at, by, etc. - hey when I do a literal search, I mean literal, not liberal, damn it). Alltheweb is getting pretty good though, and IMO it does a better job on finding foreign pages and has better advanced search capabilities than Google.

Re:Altavista the best?

[Alomex]

I don't think Excite ever had the crown (for example, AFAIK it didn't properly support advanced searches). The list goes more or less like this

Lycos
Infoseek
Open Text
Altavista
Inktomi
Altavista
Google

With Altavista and Google being the two that have been on top the longest.

Re:Altavista the best?

[Zendar]

Boy, do I remember. I think it was a per-search fee of $.05. However, they would let you sign up for a free 1 week trial. I just kept signing up with a bogus email address each time (back then, they didn't verify the email addresses).

The pay-per-search didn't last that long and they soon went to banner ads, which were just beginning to gain momentum around that time.

As for my preference, I used Infoseek religously until about mid-2000 when I finally switched to Google.

Re:Altavista the best?

[Reziac]

Or to be accurate, what ads Google has are generally somewhat relevant to whatever you searched for, and meanwhile don't hit you over the head. Google is the only place where I semi-regularly follow an ad link, because it's what I wanted anyway and didn't poke my eyes out trying to get my attention.

Re:Altavista the best?

[NeoSkandranon]

They squandered the market they exceled in to pursue what the VCs told them would be of value.

What precisely does VC mean in that context? Whenever i read it i think "Victor-charlie" ie, vietcong

Re:Altavista the best?

[Anonymous Coward]

My history with AltaVista

I had almost zero interest in the internet until there was AltaVista. Fire up lynx and go http://altavista.digital.com, and you could get lost for hours on end. Then they started going overboard on graphics. That sucked when you were using Netscape on 14.4Kbps . Spammers and search optimizers and the whole eyeball fetish of the dot.com boom rendered AltaVista increasingly unusable, and with other alternatives crowding the marketplace, AltaVista was becoming irrelevant. (The same marketing forces impinge upon Google today, if you ask me.) Finally, paid placements really killed AltaVista for me. That destroyed a lot of other search engines too. Until Google was on the scene I prefered directories like yahoo! or dmoz and dreaded having to resort to a search engine.

Another Account

Digital Equipment Corporation's (DEC) AltaVista was a latecomer to the scene; it had its online debut in December 1995. Nonetheless, it had a number of innovative features that quickly catapulted it to the top. The least of the features was its speed. Run on a bunch of DEC Alphas, it had the horsepower to handle millions of hits per day without slowing down in the slightest.

The rest of its features, all available from introduction, changed the face of search engines forever. AltaVista was the first to use natural language queries, meaning a user could type in a sentence like "What is the weather like in Tokyo?" and not get a million pages containing the word "What." Additionally, it was the first to implement advanced searching techniques, such as the use of Boolean operators (AND, OR, NOT, etc.). Furthermore, a user could search newsgroup articles and retrieve them via the web as well as specifically search for text in image names, titles, Java applets, and ActiveX objects. Additionally, AltaVista claims to be the first search engine to allow users to add to and delete their own URLs from the index, placing them online within 24 hours.

One of the most interesting new features AltaVista provided was the ability to search for all of the sites that link to a particular URL. This was very useful for web designers who were trying to get some popularity for their pages; they could frequently check to see how many other pages were referencing them.

....

Here's the source for this quote. Here's a list of search engine history links where I found that essay.

The list I found by googling "AltaVista history," which gives good results on the first page, but has a lot of "noise" after that. Contrasted with altavista or alltheweb, google seemed to know what I want. Vivisimo also adequately foregrounded what I wanted, and makes it easy to refine the search. Altavista's Prisma has a good refined search, but it is called simply "engines" and in the context of sites that may have been about the Industrial Revolution or Medieval sieges, it didn't quite jump out at me. Teoma gives relevant results on the first page and an outstanding search refinement. Based on this, I'd say the new altavista is good, but I've got my eye on teoma.

Re:Altavista the best?

[the_womble]

Alltheweb is getting pretty good though

It is, but it seems to take a lot longer update its index when pages change.

The last time I made major changes on my site Google had updated in a week or two, Altavista and Alltheweb took literally months.

Presumeable this is why I see far more hits from Google's spider in my site's logs.

Re:Altavista the best?

[ergo98]

Hehe, Venture Capitalists: The people with the $ behind many of the .COM mistakes. Basically they were looking to lend some start-up money and then get the hell out with loads of profit before everyone realized that the fundamentals just weren't there.

Re:Altavista the best?

[Anonymous Coward]

Venture Capital(ists), the people who invest $10e6 in a company when the company needs money to try to make more money.

Re:Altavista the best?

[Snork Asaurus]

This seems to confirm my subjective assessment that Google is pretty quick on the updates. I remember reading years ago that Altavista had decreased it's frequency of updates to every 3-4 months or so, while increasing advertising (less for more -you gotta love those MBA's - I hope there's a special place in hell for them). On the web, that game plan has to be about the fastest possible route to obscurity.

Hardware.

[saintlupus]

I wonder if its still running on the Alpha cluster from back in the day.

Christ, I just realized that Altavista hasn't been the best since DEC got bought out. Hey, HPQ, fuck you in the eye. Again.

--saint

Re:Hardware.

[sparrow_hawk]

Probably (sadly) not. Commodity hardware is better, faster, and cheaper now. But didn't the Alpha kick!

My own baby is sitting next to me right now -- a 553MHz Alpha. If only DEC had been able to capitalize on that chip! Whaaaaa... ;-)

Re:Hardware.

[Anonymous Coward]

The backends are still Alpha; the frontends are Linux.

What I don't get is...

[DaftShadow]

... why Babelfish still is such an amazingly wonderful waste of time.

Re:What I don't get is...

[Angry White Guy]

The English->french->german->english translation rocked! Always a laugh.

The article translated:
Waterlooppln77 document "Alta Vista changed recently search engines for it, around more competition with Google.com. to leave it offers a whole set of new devices like the research by pdf documents and débarasse substantially the thingie commercialcolumn-resounds." Everyone remember when Alta Vista was the best research engine?

Yes

[hackwrench]

+ and - just don't work the same way in Google.

The results are still 6m+ old

[LWolenczak]

The results on altavista still have not gotten better... they always seem to be upwards of six months old... where google seems to be within the month in most cases... hell...I see google's bot hit my personal webserver about every two to three weeks. I have not seen altavista's bot in a very very very long time..

Re:The results are still 6m+ old

[Anonymous Coward]

Google has my new 2 week old webpages up for searching, and I'm getting dozens of hits from there.

Altavista still has the temporary marker page that I replaced in JUNE

and it's bloated.

Re:The results are still 6m+ old

[stain ain]

Maybe not related to the new altavista, but the thing is I received a visit from altavista's bot 3 days ago, first time since my website is somewhat new. I've been listed in google for a couple of months, from today I am as well in altavista.
The thing is, maybe you should expect altavista's bot in your place one of these days.

Re:The results are still 6m+ old

[bad-badtz-maru]

I've noticed that too, about altavista. A subdomain of mine that hasn't even resolved for over six months still shows up in AV's search results.

maru

AltaVista Renewed?

[The J Kid]

AltaVista Renewed?

Eh? As in almost, but not quite slashdotted out of existance?

But anyway, there tech was allready renewed, now it's just the new design, which, as with all proper web-design, is as unspectaculair as google now.

Anyway, I do feel old now.... :(

I remember

[Anonymous Coward]

altavista.digital.com

"Anyone remember when Alta Vista was the best search engine?"

Re:I remember

[VAXman]

You know, the old altavista.digital.com URL is still in service. I just tried it. Pretty amazing.

Re:I remember

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, but I miss the good old Digital logo that used to be on the page.

Re:I remember

[digitalsushi]

Your version of amazing is my version of lazy-admin syndrome. :D

Re:I remember

[big.ears]

Man--you just reminded me how I would frequently type in 'digital.altavista.com' and get nowhere.

Re:I remember

[Anonymous Coward]

Lol. yeah they were the best like 3 years ago. i used them on avery daily basis but for some reason when my Dad (:OMG 60 year old people still know better lmfao) introduced me to http://www.google.com I was hooked. I never ever once again visited AltaVista ever again. Never worried about Ads again. Cached websites - :OMG a God Send. Translated Pages for Languages, PDF, Doc ( I hate bopening both up in the browser), and almost anything else you could think of

Re:I remember

[kalidasa]

Your version of lazy-admin syndrome is my version of smart admins use persistant URIs; or, as Tim Berners-Lee put it, "Cool URIs Don't Change."

Re:I remember

[Anonymous Coward]

What about the World Wide Worm by Brian something. Didn't it become MetaCrawler?

ac

not really.....

[vertical_98]

I do remember when you could search through 4 or 5 different search engines and get 4 or 5 different search results. HotBot would always return a porn site in the top ten results regardless of what you where searching for.

Vertical

Be fair, now

[ekrout]

Anyone remember when Alta Vista was the best search engine?

While that was an innocent, playful poke at the AV folks, let's not forget that some of us still remember when Google was "just an academic project" and its founders were "of course going to give all future modifications to their PageRank algorithm".

Some of us were let down by the Stanford research project that "sold out" and failed to give back to the community from which it was birthed originally. I'm proud of Google, don't get me wrong; but there's still a small part of me that would have liked to see it stay non-commercial.

Re:Be fair, now

[verch]

If you want to be fair, consider this, Google is a fantastic service. Probably (no, definitely) the single most useful thing on the internet, and the most useful thing all around since duct tape. And its free. So I'd say they are doing ok by the community. Think it would exist if they hadnt 'sold out' and started taking money for tiny little non intrusive ads? I don't think so, and that would suck.

Re:Be fair, now

[Anonymous Coward]

The small part of you would have seen it fade into obscurity like other non-commercial great ideas. If the dot com years taught us anything it should be that if you don't have a real idea about how you're going to be funded and self-sufficient, you're fucked.

Re:Be fair, now

[Anonymous Coward]

My Ducttape doesn't hold me together, My Hobbits dont scour the world for Information. And Granted cheese gets boring after a few months. Yeah I'd have to say that Google was the best thing since Slied breat, Sliced Cheese and i may go even as far as saying better then Duct Tape or Hobbits

Re:Be fair, now

[Anonymous Coward]

"sold out" and failed to give back to the community

you know, even though google may be commercial, ads aren't quietly planted inside your search results (a la yahoo 5 years ago, maybe now? i never go there), in fact, the ads are at the top of your results, highlighted and specifically marked as a "sponsored link".. and since google is so damn efficient and so damn free, i'd say they've given back A LOT to the community.

Re:Be fair, now

[whereiswaldo]

So I'd say they are doing ok by the community. Think it would exist if they hadnt 'sold out' and started taking money for tiny little non intrusive ads?

I actually _like_ their text ads, and I really, really hate graphical ads. To me, it's an unobtrusive and polite way to tell me something, and I often find myself reading them.

Re:Be fair, now

[Anonymous Coward]

umm I don't really care about the ad's that come with the search results, google needs funding, what I don't like is the POPUP ad the comes up with google (for some reason it comes up 50% of the time when I load the page?). Google results are still great as far as I'm concerned, I don't search for porn, and if I want something commercial I probably want whoever had the most money to shell out to google anyway.

As for altavista being the best... no I don't remember this ever happening. Before disney bought it and commercialized it, I remember infoseek being the best for technical searches (which is all that matters). Yahoo aws good if wanted to find something.

Re:Be fair, now

[Zork the Almighty]

Google does not display popup ads. You probably have spyware of some kind on your computer. You can read what google has to say about it at this page. http://www.google.com/help/nopopupads.html

Re:Be fair, now

[g00set]

"Some of us were let down by the Stanford research project that "sold out" and failed to give back to the community from which it was birthed originally"

You felt the need to put scare quotes around "sold out" but not the played out phrase "failed to give back to the community". What the hell is this supposed to mean?

Google is a "corporation" which I know from the cozy confines of acadamia seems unsettling but in reality they are not that bad. Bottom line is corporations create jobs which in capitilism "is a good thing" If you care to differ that capitalism itself is a "good thing" well of course that is a different topic.
Now we must look at what Google has done as a "corporation". (BTW found an interview I was thinking of as I typed through Google)

• Changed the entire way accurate search results are displayed and stuck to it.
• Did not mutate into a portal.
• Has continued to provide and create jobs while most others were folding around them.

Please expand on giving back to the community near you? I for one would like the stop sign fixed down the road...and maybe even a better traffic pattern because it is kind of dangerous. Wake up. Google is "giving back to the community" by providing jobs and ensuring "bad" ideas like portals continue to fail in the market providing a better alternative.

Re:Be fair, now

[Uma Thurman]

Little text ads are the best. How many of us will click away from a loud noisy commercial, yet we will buy the Sunday paper in part to read all those little classified ads?

If you remove marketing from advertizing, you're left with a classified ad. Slashdot should start running those things, as Kuro5hin does. I'd buy a couple of them to promote my upcoming movies.

Re:Be fair, now

[Galvatron]

Absolutely, I think it's a useful feature. When doing a search, not only is it good to have those pages listed that a computer thinks are "the best," it's also useful to know which sites are willing to pay the most to be listed. Especially when you're looking to buy something (doing a search for, say, "skis" might turn up a lot of informational sites, but the ads are likely to be for places that sell skis). Hopefully, it also reduces the incentive to cheat, because you can just buy an ad placement.

ummm...

[Bluesman]

Anyone remember when Alta Vista was the best search engine?

No? Yeah, well, my memory's not that good either.

Re:ummm...

[Angry White Guy]

Based on Altavista's up-to-date search info, just look it up.

astalavista.box.sk rocks!

[Anonymous Coward]

oh wait... astavista? nope... never heard of it. is it the same as yahoo?

I hate to be a spelling troll...

[i_need_no_nick]

...but 'thingie' is supposed to be spelled 'thingy'. Damn stupid slashdot readers don't even know proper spellnigs...

Re:I hate to be a spelling troll...

[MadLibs]

...but 'thingie' is supposed to be spelled 'thingy'. Damn stupid slashdot readers don't even know proper spellnigs...

cuz you KNOW that "thingy/ie" is SUCH a scientific word! (and please tell me that "spellNIGS" was purposeful.....)

Hehe

[ekrout]

Anyone remember when Alta Vista was the best search engine?

Anyone remember when Slashdot had a search engine?

(yes, I realize it's "kind of" working right now...well, at least the last time I checked it...)

Re:Hehe

[Anonymous Coward]

Slashdot needs to use the google search api instead of their own crappy open source one. It doesn't cost much money.

I can't stand Slashdot's search. I always just fire up google and do the site:slashdot.org "..."

Re:Sheesh

[LWolenczak]

If you have been looking around recently... everybody does that.... inktomi, ?infosearch?, the whole lot of them... what google has over all of them is up to date content

Quick comparison

[rde]

I've found three reasons thus far for sticking with google:

News. Google's may be experimental, but it's great. I've dropped most of the science news portals I visit in favour of google.

Puerile searches. I've just done a search for "pubic health" on both google and AV. The latter returned nothing.

Uptodatedness; google hit my site less than three hours ago. No record of AV at all at all.

Of course, all this is based on a (really) quick evaluation of AV, and as such is probably unfair, hasty and uninformed. In the best slashdot tradition.

Re:Quick comparison

[hopbine]

Did you mean PUBLIC HEALTH.
Interestingly google turned up many results on PUBIC HEALTH, but on further inspection it gave results for public. eg "pubic health nurses" Interesting.

Re:Quick comparison

[BagOBones]

Thats the best feature of google.. It spell checks your search and if no results return with your spelling it switches to what it thinks is the correct spelling.. IF both return results it has a link at the top to try its spelling.

Re:Sheesh

[visualight]

oh my god...

But..

[LordHunter317]

Will I still get porn ads when I search for porn?

Re:But..

[GreyWolf3000]

Will I still get porn hits when I search for flowers to send my mother on Mother's Day?

Re:But..

[Kragg]

If you insist on sending her cherry blossoms, tender young buds and 'deflowers' ('de flowers, mon, for me modda, ye get me mon?'), then yes.

But have you tried it...?

[stevejsmith]

Has anybody actually tried Altavista yet? I have, and I can say it's better. I don't know how much better, but it does look like they've gotten rid of the paid ads that blend in with the searches. As for compatibility, great job! It looks perfect in Opera, and even that little thing they use with the blue bar works.

Re:But have you tried it...?

[stevejsmith]

When I say better, I meant better than it was previously, not necessarily better than Google.

Slashdot requires you to wait 20 seconds between hitting 'reply' and submitting a comment. It's been 15 seconds since you hit 'reply'! Note: chances are, you're behind a firewall, or proxy, or clicked the Back button to accidentally reuse a form. We know about those kinds of errors. But if you think you shouldn't be getting this error, feel free to file a bug report, telling us: Your browser type Your userid "614145" What steps caused this error Whether you used the Back button on your browser Whether or not you know your ISP to be using a proxy, or any sort of service that gives you an IP that others are using simultaneously How many posts to this form you successfully submitted during the day Please set the Category to "Formkeys." Thank you.

Re:But have you tried it...?

[Anonymous Coward]

The queries I tried resulted in the same old hits, but hey, there's a movie/mp3 tab there! Way to go, and wait until the lawsuits start flowing in.

Altavista still sucks

[Anonymous Coward]

Search results for "free donkey pr0n":

AltaVista - 162
Google - about 500

'nuff said.

Re:Altavista still sucks

[Angry White Guy]

Bwa-ha-ha-ha! Now there's a run on Google as the hordes of /.'ers go to get their fill!

Re:Altavista still sucks

[Anonymous Coward]

Right, but if you search for images Alta Vista wins handily.

Re:Altavista still sucks

[Anonymous Coward]

I just did this search, google 411 results, alta vista 162 or something.

more importantly, from altavista results, I found a great website:

http://www.grapeshot.net/

new av rules!

Re:Altavista still sucks

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, but is it QUALITY Donkey p0rn?

Re:Altavista still sucks

[Anonymous Coward]

looks like quality stoned donkey pr0n. w00t!

Re:Sheesh

[Jugalator]

What the fuck does google have? Googlefights?? How much does any of that mean when Google's ranking system is corrupt, ie they allow people to pay for their ranking. Besides that, google now censors its content. Google is looking really weak at the moment.

Google has a ranking system, Altavista hasn't. At least I wish to find the most linked to sites when I search for something. Some people I've heard wish to let everyone have an equal chance, but I think that's a very bad idea, which the results of Altavista proves.

You say the ranking system is "corrupt". Sure it's exploitable, but not to the level that the results it gives are upside down. There are few sites that I've noticed exploit the ranking system. And as long as I think Google give more relevant search results than Altavista, who cares about the minor group of exploiters?

And I couldn't care less about Google's censoring system... The less nazi rubbish I stumble upon the better. They could start censoring kiddie porn as well. There are soo many ways to find this shit anyway if you really feel an urge to see it. Use Altavista for example.

Their new features

[goombah99]

from the alta vista web site:
Fresh, relevant results: AltaVista refreshes 50% of the results daily. Results include PDF files as well as Web pages, images, audio and video files.

How is this possible. Surely you can't poll 50% of the web every day. Nor could you even poll 50% of the spiderable web every day. This seems absurd, but its their number one ranked improvement.

AltaVista Shortcuts and AltaVista Shortcut Answers find results on Web pages that are usually invisible to search engines. (on the U.S. Site only)

Umm does this mean Alta Vista is going to start ignoring ROBOTS.TXT permissions? I dont think they are talking about PDF documents because they called that feature out in a separate bullet. So what is the Invisi-weba dn why do only they have access to it?

this soundslike vacuous hype.

Re:Their new features

[sumengen]

> Umm does this mean Alta Vista is going to start ignoring ROBOTS.TXT permissions?

No, i think it is similar to google phone/address finder, map finder, etc. future, which is displayed at the top of search results.

Re:Their new features

[cymandee]

Umm does this mean Alta Vista is going to start ignoring ROBOTS.TXT permissions?

If they did that, many webmasters would quickly block their spider, and all other search engines would give results that would be invisible to Alyavista...

Maybe they have contracts with websites to be atuhorized to reach some of the robots.txt protected pages.

Now, that would be a nasty evolution...

Re:Their new features

[tigress]

50% of the web? No, but perhaps 50% of the results returned. Considering that most people never check beyond the first page of results, and most people search for the same things, such as sex, free donkey pr0n and stripped backplanes, I could imagine reindexing the 50% most popular searches quite easily.

Re:Their new features

[jcoy42]

How is this possible. Surely you can't poll 50% of the web every day. Nor could you even poll 50% of the spiderable web every day.

I believe they need to define the word "refresh".

Perhaps they invested in IBM Deathstars, and find themselves "refreshing" large portions from backup on a daily basis?

Re:Their new features

[fymidos]

> How is this possible. Surely you can't poll 50% of the web every day.

sure you can.
If you monitor 0.01% of internet, that is :>

-- anyway it's good that someone is finally doing something since my whole life was just TOO dependent on google up to now. have you ever thought what would happen if google stopped working?

>Umm does this mean Alta Vista is going to start ignoring ROBOTS.TXT permissions?

Well, invisible web is mostly about databases, i still can't figure a way to crawl there. And why only U.S.?
(the answer is trivial of course but i don't want to say it :> --said too much already, i just hope few people see this. )

(DOH! dont read the above comment as racist)

[MadLibs]

i was trying to distinguish the typo --- not make a slur of any sort... sorry

Compaq Alpha

[Anonymous Coward]

Compaq Alpha coupled with an Altavista search engine was my wet dream in the mid-nineties; I had a 486-33/Win 3.11 search monster for my 20MB HD back then.

alta vista was best?

[fatgraham]

"Anyone remember when Alta Vista was the best search engine?"

I remember a time when AV was the last resort after yahoo. when was the last time anyone used yahoo? :)

Re:alta vista was best?

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, I still use Yahoo all the time...

Well, it links to Google, so I'm indirectly using Google.

Wrong question :)

[TV-SET]

Anyone remember when Alta Vista was the best search engine?

Yeah, I do. But does anyone remember when the time when people didn't need a search engine? I don't :)

Re:Wrong question :)

[Jon Peterson]

Yup, I do. Near the beginning of the web, NCSA kept a 'what's new' page, that listed every new website created that week. It grew exponentially of course, and became pretty useless pretty fast, and was then stopped. The archives are still available, e.g.

http://archive.ncsa.uiuc.edu/SDG/Software/Mosaic /D ocs/old-whats-new/whats-new-0693.html

Of course search engines were still important, but everyone just used archie for searching FTP sites, or maybe Veronica for searching Gopher sites.

Re:Wrong question :)

[Anonymous Coward]

Me neither, but I do remember only having things like WAIS and a bunch of comic strip characters!

Re:Wrong question :)

[slashhot]

does anyone remember when the time when people didn't need a search engine?

I remember the days when the "search engine" was a thick book named "The Internet Yellow Pages". We've come a long way since then...

Re:Wrong question :)

[flippet]

Ah, history...

"The Department of Informatics at the Federal University of Santa Catarina, BRAZIL, is now running a WWW Server. Please note : our link is slow = 9600 bps."

Phil, just me

Re:Wrong question :)

[Spazzz]

*sigh* I kinda miss gopher.

Digital et al

[SpikeSpegiel]

Its quite simple why Altavista sucks now. They used to be Altavista.digital.com because digital ran it. Digital had pride, after all, the built the fastest single chip processor in the world, why not have the best search engine. For a time they did. However, Digital's marketing dept couldn't seem to sell the best product (what a bunch of idiots if you ask me), so digital was bought out. Without Digital's influence, Altavista no longer had any drive to be the best. Just like the Alpha, its unfortuente to see some of Digitals best projects languish to obscurity, after all, HPQ killed Alpha within the past 6 months or so. Apperently competition with intel is bad*Palladium edit, Violation of EULA, do bashing intel*

Re:Digital et al

[esarjeant]

Actually, that was what inspired me to find a new search engine more than anything else. Suddenly -- one day out of the blue -- www.altavista.digital.com stopped working.

Given what happened to Digital, it's not a huge surprise that this kind of difficulty might surface. It appears this URL works again, but I have no intention of going back.

Google is faster, produces more reliable/pertinent results and since they folded in DejaNews it's pretty much the only search engine I need.

Re:Digital et al

[Anonymous Coward]

If you have an Athlon processor, you are using part of Digital's product. The Athlon design integrated some of the features of the Alpha because many Digital engineers went to AMD.

The Design

[Beautyon]

The Design, whilst trying to look stripped down, isnt as good as Goggle, Daypop or any of the dozens of other more "fresh" services. Perhaps they will do somethig about it.

Re:The Design

[Anonymous Coward]

Agreed. Instead of "clean", it just looks "cheap", but then CMGI doesn't have quite so much scratch to throw at it these days, I guess. ;)

Re:The Design

[pod]

It's also bigger byte-wise. AV: 10K, Google: 1.2K.

digital

[Spacelord]

Does anyone still remember when the url was actually altavista.digital.com? I believe the reason was someone else already had the altavista.com domain and didn't want to give it up.

Re:digital

[RapDoggy]

they also bought av.com later on.

Sneaky Links

[Anonymous Coward]

The bastards have the search result links prefixed and they use JavaScript to hide that fact when you mouse over so they can spy on what links you click. I think Google may have done that in the past, but their links look normal now.

<td class=csr onclick="BlOp('/r?ck_sm=5282c169&ref=200020080&uid =477b1d8923f776&r=http%3A%2F%2Fchorus.inav.net%2F% 7Ebjackson%2F')" title="Open result in a new window" bgcolor=#C9D8EE id="bl3" width=10 onMouseOver="status='http://chorus.inav.net/~bjack son/'; return true;" onMouseOut="status=''; return true;">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;</td>

Re:Sneaky Links

[Anonymous Coward]

Google does exactly same thing. It's rare, but it does happen. It's no more than two weeks when I last saw that behavior. I told to friend of mine and she didn't get spy links. I went to workstation next to me and did same search and no spylinks. Reloaded it on my own workstation and spylinks were there. I think they have some servers on cluster in spy mode and it's just bad luck to get result page with links to google logging system.

Re:Sneaky Links

[Anonymous Coward]

BTW, this is described in the privacy policy (http://www.google.com/privacy.html)

Re:Sneaky Links

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, I've seen Google watching what links you click too.

It only happens sometimes, very rarely, but I have noticed it happening..

Strange.

Re:Sneaky Links

[Spy Hunter]

My theory is that google adds the spy links randomly about once every 100 or so pages it serves. That way they can keep track of what people are visiting statistically but the average searcher doesn't have to bounce through google's servers (adding a significant amount of time to the wait after clicking on a result link).

Re:Sneaky Links

[0x0d0a]

Their documentation covers this. They do this randomly once every hundred searches or so. The idea is that this way they can't very well "track" people and people don't have to go through the delay-inducing redirect every time. However, they do like gathering statistics (mmm...Google people like data) and determining which sites are the most popular. It's the easiest way for them to tell whether they're giving out the right sites at the top of their hits.

Tons-o-Fun with Babellfish

[Anonymous Coward]

Whenever I'm down, i always go to The Fish and always gain a fresh perspective on life...

Waterlooppln77 writes "Alta Vista has changed it recently to the motors search, to grant more competition with Google.com. It offers to complete oration new characteristics, how looking for will remember by the document pdf ignited, and more importantly the commercial Portalthingie."los each one, in which the best motor was Alta Vista search?

(that's English->German->English->Spanish->Englis h)

Re:Tons-o-Fun with Babellfish

[Anonymous Coward]

What about Spanglish - the #1 most important Foreign Language

Still needs work.

[Anonymous Coward]

Im still waiting for the ultimate engine. The ultimate engine would need

* web search
* image search
* multimedia search
* application search (for all OS's)
* news search
* news group search
* map search (the whole world)
* universal directory enquires
* translation
* dicstionary / thesaurus
* spell checking
* local info pages (the whole world)
* price comparisions
* and the most important feature, NO SPONSORED LINKS! I would gladly pay £10 a month to get rid of this shit.

Give me that, and a kitchen sink search and i will be very happy.

Re:Sheesh

[kungfuBreaks]

Here's a little experiment you might want to try: pick a query, any query, and compare how high up the list the relevant results are in Google and AltaVista. The reason people switched to using Google is that it's a _much_ better search engine (not to mention the fact that it's cleaner, commercial free, etc). Or that's why I switched anyhow.

Even Cleaner (Text Search!)

[RapDoggy]

Here bookmark this one in your favorites!

http://www.altavista.com/web/text

Beat that Google (-:

Re:Even Cleaner (Text Search!)

[Anonymous Coward]

Testing 1-2-3
Testing 1-2-3

Re:Even Cleaner (Text Search!)

[Anonymous Coward]

There's actually been something like that for altavista for a long time (I remember using it when Altavista didn't suck). Also though, google is about that simple in Lynx too and because google has less adds on the results than that text version of altavista it's still easier to browse your results in google.

Re:Even Cleaner (Text Search!)

[jesser]

The main difference between that and normal Altavista is that it doesn't have an untargeted graphical banner ad. It has most of the same junk (refine your search, sponsored matches) taking up vertical space and pushing the first result past the bottom of my browser's viewport. In constrast, Google always shows at least one result without scrolling, and Alltheweb shows two or three with my custom Alltheweb style sheet. I browse in a maximized window at 800x600.

Re:Even Cleaner (Text Search!)

[pod]

I fail to see how this bare text-only page is STILL bigger (byte-wise) than Google's main search page...

Re:Even Cleaner (Text Search!)

[ShaunC]

http://www.altavista.com/web/text

Beat that Google (-:

Well, I'm not Google, but: http://www.raging.com beats it by 11 bytes. (They go to the same place :)

Shaun

Ah.. AltaVista

[Anonymous Coward]

I for one do remember the glorious days of my early online experiences. From InfoSeek to Lycos to WebCrawler to AltaVista. Had it not been for Slashdot, I'd still been using good old AltaVista. But now, it's Google all the way.

Preferences

[natron 2.0]

I still prefer Mamma (www.mamma.com) as my search engine of choice. It is a meta search engine which means it searches many other search engines to give you the best results.

Re:Preferences

[Anonymous Coward]

The name stinks! 'nuff said. Ask yo mamma.com for pr0n.

Re:Preferences

[DansnBear]

Och. . . Meta search engines. . . That's a memory. . . I almost forgot what my favorite search engine use to be before i discovered google. I was always partial to MetaCrawler which, BTW, also seams to have gotten an interface facelift also. (damn, havent been there in years)

Remember When....?

[aliens]

Does the fact that I remember when altavista was the best search engine mean I'm getting old?? Was it really that long ago? I guess it was in internet time. *Sigh* guess it's almost time to break out the Matlock and prune juice.

Signed,
An old fogey

Archie.. Lycos.. FTPsearch...

[Anonymous Coward]

Archie, Lycos (1994) and FTPsearch (1995) are legendary. I used archie, but Lycos was a great improvement: Loved the web-based interface.
Kept using Lycos for many years, untill friends convinced me the newbie Altavista got more hits. (And less duplicates)
History repeated itself when I "discovered" Google in the same way - by word of mouth. Yet a better engine than altavista again. But for file searches, FTPsearch is still unbeaten.

Triumph

[tauntalum]

What a wonderful search engine!

FOR ME TO POOP ON!

AltaVista vs. Google: speed and relevance shootout

[Graabein]

I just did a test, I tried entering the single search word "Jaguar", and wanted to compare:

• Speed. Speed is very important in a search engine, if it ain't fast it ain't usable as a tool for everyday work. I tried a real life search for "Jaguar" as well as a search that is almost guaranteed not to be cached.
  
• Paid placement at the top of the results, or "sponsored links" as the search engines like to call it.
  
• Relevant matches. Specifically I wanted to see how near the top Jag-Lovers, the largest non-profit Jaguar enthusiast site, got.
  

The result were conclusive: Google wins hands down on all counts. Altavista lists half a page of paid for "sponsored links" before any actual search results are returned. Google has none, but curiously the topmost link is for MacOS X - Jaguar. Did Apple pay Google to have MacOS placed above any links for Jaguar cars, or is this a result of thousands of Mac users linking to Apple's MacOS X site?

Altavista was sloooow, taking several seconds to return a non-cached search result (try searching for something "unusual", or a completely made up word). Google is fast, returning the first results page instantly, no matter what.

Relevance: MacOS X is of course very relevant to a search for "Jaguar", even if it's not what I expected ;-). Google lists it at the very top of the first page, Altavista has a mention of MacOS X at the bottom of page 1, but not Apple's homepage for OS X. Jag-Lovers was only listed on page 3 on Altavista, after 3 pages of various commercial sites, including of course Jaguar Cars' various sites. Google lists Jag-Lovers near the bottom of page 1, after Jaguar Cars' sites.

There is no question in my mind, Google is the best tool. YMMV. Oh, and yes, I remember when we all marvelled at Altavista and read about how the project started out as an idea scratched down on a napkin over lunch at DEC. DEC is dead, and so will Altavista be soon enough. Google is so much better, so why should Altavista survive in the long run?

Wow...

[frawaradaR]

It can search thru boring PDFs no one is ever going to read anyway, but yet can't index UTF-16 web pages? Hello!?

Besides, you can't really put your own stuff there... a limit on 5 pages, that _might_ be included in a month or two.

A good search engine takes pride in indexing everything, as fast as possible.

pop-up adv, or google?

[jdkane]

Damn, at first I thought this /. post linked to a popup advertisement but THAT IS AltaVista's new look! There appear to be some overarching similarities between the new AltaVista look and domainsforsale.com (warning: watch out for pop-ups). As for that fancy highlight thingy to the left side of the AltaVista search results, I give it a 2 month survival period, because it's annoying and and doesn't serve a purpose.

I partly apologize for being so critical, but obviously they tried to go for Google's look (unfair). Even though imitation is a form of flatery, AltaVista should stand on its own merits which is the quality of the search results.

Google still on top :|

[gt25500]

After a simple search for "gt25500" on both sites, google returned 5+ times the amount of results. Bunch of old crap that I wash it _didn't_ find, but hell...when I wanna dig dirt up on someone I want it alllll. I'm not touching Altavista again until it redirects to google.

Metacrawler

[Anonymous Coward]

Remember when "Metacrawler" used to be great? Anyone know why it became less useful? Or did Google simply leap that far ahead?

Doesn't work

[at_18]

It still doesn't work. I searched for my name and I find myself 2nd.
With google, I am 1st.

Well, it's clear which is bringing more justice to the world.

Re:Doesn't work

[Reziac]

I just did a search for one of my aliases, which is two words in a unique arrangement, and should return exactly one result. I thereby discovered that Altavista's "exact phrase search" is broken. It returned *anything* with one word or the other, but NOT the single instance that should come up with both words adjacent.

Indeed, it seems to be parsing only on "any of these words" no matter how I tried it. Regexp is apparently not part of their vocabulary.

Tried a number of searches whose google output I'm familiar with, and AV didn't do very well on any of them. :(

Re:Doesn't work

[rmohr02]

So you can google whack, but you can't altavista whack?

Re:Doesn't work

[Anonymous Coward]

Sucker!! I'm still first place on both google and altavista. :-P - 'zcat'

Dammit, I've forgotten my slashdot login :(

Alta Vista

[inode_buddha]

yes, I remember all of it.

Asta la Vista. baby!

Magic...

[wneto]

Yesterday i did a search for my website and it was the first. Now it shows everything but my site!
Way to go Altavista!
Now ill have to submit it again.. hmm.. NOT.

Blind users can't add pages

[yerricde]

Besides, you can't really put your own stuff there

Especially if you don't have much vision. The Add URL form requires the user to 1. read a bitmapped image compressed using proprietary UNISYS(tm) technology, 2. enter all the letters from that image into a text box, and THEN 3. enter URLs. This supposedly keeps out bots that spam the form, but it also keeps out blind users and other users behind textual user agents such as w3m or Links because they cannot complete step 1.

Re:Blind users can't add pages

[Anonymous Coward]

That does look bad, but have you tried to contact them? I searched altavista for "blind" and got a couple of relevant results, like the nfb.org site-- which uses javascript to rotate images. Are links and w3m capable of using that site?

I've always kind of wanted to make a pitch black website using sounds and scripting to navigate (something like js or dynamic html manipulating sound files in response to the pointer). Are blind people largely eschewing the full-featured browsers that could handle something like that?

Where do I find the REAL websites for the blind?

Re:AltaVista vs. Google: speed and relevance shoot

[quacking duck]

Did Apple pay Google to have MacOS placed above any links for Jaguar cars, or is this a result of thousands of Mac users linking to Apple's MacOS X site?

I doubt it was paid for. Quite simply, Jaguar car owners are more likely to be driving their car around than writing web pages about them. Not so OSX Jag users, ergo, more web pages linking to Apple than Jaguar Cars.

gnu test

[bumby]

It doesn't pass the gnu-test

Searchword: gnu
Result: First link:

Gnu Snowboards at CORERIDE.com
GNU snowboards available at CORERIDE.com. The rider's online store.

Conclution: Useless

Re:gnu test

[Anonymous Coward]

Conclution: You are an uneducated zealot who tries too hard to be part of the "crowd".

Re:gnu test

[Anonymous Coward]

Conclution: You take "stuff" way to serious.

Hell, I remember when Yahoo was the best.

[Glytch]

It actually had searching. I remember when you could go to Yahoo at it's Berkeley student account website to see if any new websites existed today.

Bah. Whippersnappers.

(Can I get a (+1, Old Fart) moderation?)

Re:Hell, I remember when Yahoo was the best.

[Amit J. Patel]

It was at yahoo.stanford.edu, not at Berkeley.

Re:Hell, I remember when Yahoo was the best.

[Glytch]

Damn, you're right. It's been so long, and all my old bookmarks are long since gone.

I remember when...

[venomkid]

...altavista was the only good search engine. Then everybody decided to make their search engine a "portal." Except Google... hmmm... :) vk.

Re:I remember when...

[whereiswaldo]

Then everybody decided to make their search engine a "portal."

To me, there are some things that a portal is good for. One of those things is _not_ to have categorized links for every topic imaginable right on the front page. I don't have time to read that. Instead of clicking the "Sports" item, it's faster for me to simply type "Sports".

I think that possibly site owners are getting back to the basics and getting rid of the big, bloated pages that used to seem so impressive and professional (yeah sure).

AltaVista Lite

[PastaAnta]

AltaVista has actually had a "lite" version without the heavy commercial portal thingie for quite some time.

The link is/was: www.raging.com

But now I can see it has changed to point to the same renewed interface as www.altavista.com.

Re: remember when

[Trevin]

I don't remember Alta Vista ever being my first choice. Before Google, I always used Yahoo to look up sites by category (directory browsing), and either Excite or Infoseek for keyword searches. If those engines didn't turn up what I was looking for, then I'd try Alta Vista, because they would return many more results than anyone else.

The problem was that in most cases, Alta Vista returned so many results that the vast majority were irrelevant. It was difficult to wade through them to get to what I was actually looking for.

Then you'll like...

[tiltowait]

Lost in Translation

Re:Then you'll like...

[nucal]

The site must be Slashdotted, I got:

Original English Text:
Slashdot: News for Nerds, stuff that matters

Oops. The babel fish is being particularly unreliable right now. Perhaps try again after a cup of coffee?

So for kicks I did a manual one at Systran -

English -> French -> German -> English

Slashdot: Message for bundle, substance, which imports

GIGO

[Anonymous Coward]

To be fair, the original English was a bit crappy.

Re:Sheesh

[treat]

And I couldn't care less about Google's censoring system... The less nazi rubbish I stumble upon the better.

When censoring unpopular political beliefs, where should the line be drawn? And will this line be moved every 6 months?

AltaVista the best

[Anonymous Coward]

Anyone remember when Alta Vista was the best search engine?

No?

Webcrawler

[SideshowBob]

Webcrawler is the first web search tool I remember using (true search as opposed to directory listing a la Yahoo)

At the time I think Webcrawler was still someone's research project, as it was hosted on a .edu. This would've been around '91 or '92.

Surprisingly Webcrawler.com is an active search page, 'powered by InfoSpace'...

I've never gotten into the whole sarch engine loyalty thing. The best thing to come along IMO were tools like Sherlock on Mac OS that could run queries on multiple search engines and return the results in a single list.

Still no Unicode support

[bertilow]

Altavista still has no clue about Unicode (or other encodings). As it seems they think the whole world is built around ISO-8859-1.

Google and All the Web handle searches in most any language and most any text encoding, and does it quite well.

Re:Still no Unicode support

[21mhz]

Exactly. The international support in Google is excellent hands down. I use it for Russian language searches whenever I know exactly what wordforms I need to look for, any other inflexions aside.
NB: There is Yandex for grammatically robust Russian web search, though it doesn't exhibit the kind of relevance Google brings.

Re:Still no Unicode support

[mijok]

As far as other languages than English are concerned the possibility to add a wildcard to the end of words would help a lot (eg. "word*") due to the different endings in different forms of the same word. For example in Swedish a noun can have four different endings (singular and plural, and both as definite) and in Finnish 14-15 (replacing prepositions completely).

Re:Still no Unicode support

[frawaradaR]

Neither Google nor Altavista can handle UTF-16. Try this:

Google's indexing of UTF-16 page

Bertilo's claim is thus correct.

Now for something completely different

[abhikhurana]

Well, I read enough flaming of altavista so I ran a simple test. I searched altavista on google and google on altavista.
Altavista is still lot slower I will say and the first result it gave me was google.de, maybe because I am posting from Switzerland.
The results were fairly balanced on both sides, though I think I would still keep using google for speed.
But one kinda nice feature about altavista is the option to refine one's search. For example I got many tabs on the top about differnt things related to google.
Refine your search with AltaVista Prisma Click a term to focus your search. Click >> to replace your search. Help
Google Toolbar >>
Cool Stuff >>
English Pages >>

Erweiterte Suche >>
Language Tools >>
Search Solutions >>

Search The Web >>
Suchen Auf >>
Adwords >>

Cost-per-click >>
Suchtipps >>
Web-seiten >>

That I think is something google doesnt do as cleanly. In rest all the departements either they are equal or google is better.

Why I switched to google

[EvilOpie]

Quite honestly... I don't know why everyone complains about AltaVista's appearance for their web portal thing. Honestly, I never was too impressed with it myself though. So what I did was bookmark their text only search page. It uses even less bandwith than google, since there's not even a single graphic on the page... it's 100% text.

But there were several reasons I switched to google over time. I'd say that cached webpages were probably the biggest reason. It's annoying to find most webpages either 404'd or changed since they were spidered by the search engine. At least with google, (at the time) you could see what it looked like at the time it was searched. So you know that even if it wasn't what you were looking for, it would at least show you a cached version of the page that would have your search terms SOMEWHERE in it.

There were also other things too. Being able to search for images, more relavent searches, etc... things like that pulled me away from AltaVista. I visited AV once recently, and I noticed that they are trying to be more google-like. And with this... I'll be willing to try them out again, though I'd be surprised if they'd pull me away from google at all. But even when I switched to google, they've still always been my backup searcb engine, for when I want to see if they'll pull in slightly different results than google. But we'll see how that goes. I'd like to see them do better, I've always been fond of AltaVista.

Re:Why I switched to google

[big.ears]

Being able to search for images, more relavent searches, etc... things like that pulled me away from AltaVista.

Don't forget automatic spell-checking.

I remember AltaVista

[Lucky Kevin]

As a consultant I hooked a company up to the Internet, mid 90's. I then gave a demo to show everybody what the Internet was about and that they could quickly access information to help them in their work. The only search engine then was AltaVista, but in the pressure of the demo, I kept spelling it www.altervista.com; I only showed them email, very embarassing.

Great search engine, welcome back.

Re:AltaVista vs. Google: speed and relevance shoot

[IamTheRealMike]

Actually, minority OS users do own the net :) Try doing a google search (and this works on altavista too) for Wine - the first link goes to WineHQ for the Windows emulator.

Re:AltaVista vs. Google: speed and relevance shoot

[Anonymous Coward]

An operating system and a car...
Where are the freakin' cats?!

Re:AltaVista vs. Google: speed and relevance shoot

[cnvogel]

Graabein wrote:

> Altavista lists half a page of paid for
> "sponsored links" before any actual search
> results are returned.

Not only that: I think google's advertisements are much more easy to spot as they have this light green background....

Altavista only has a small bar on the left which is light grey for ads and a little bit darker when the actual results start.

And no wonder the pages loads that slow with all those gifs (which are of course not cached like googles logo on the top left).

OMG, Hotbot

[Snork Asaurus]

Jeez, I'd completely forgotten them. 5 years ago, they would have been my number 3 choice, after trying Altavista and Yahoo or maybe Lycos (yes kids, Yahoo was once a real search engine). I just checked and they're still there - I got misty-eyed for a moment since it brought back memories of a less commercial (by at least 2 orders of magnitude), more information and technology oriented, FLASH-FREE web. Once the advertising leeches found out about the web they started making it more like television - more and more squeal, less and less pig.

Re:OMG, Hotbot

[Anonymous Coward]

For a time hotbot had better coverage of Europe than AltaVista or Yahoo. If used to search in altavista, and then try hotbot in German or French. And at its inception hotbot was fast and efficient. Its a shame how quickly they let it get all spammy.

Re:OMG, Hotbot

[Anonymous Coward]

yes kids, Yahoo was once a real search engine

I remember when yahoo had a "stanford.edu" address.

Re:OMG, Hotbot

[0x0d0a]

Hotbot was a lot better before Wired bought it and made the interface suck.

I still find it useful (very rarely) for the single unique feature it has -- the ability to search for pages containing a link to a file of a specified extension.

Memories

[evilviper]

Anyone remember when Alta Vista was the best search engine?

Yup. It was back when Digial was the hands-down best computer manufacturer. Back when they made the fastest and most inexpensive processor (Alpha) that was going to overtake the Intel chip. DEC & Alpha had amazing potential too. I guess you can really blame Compaq for everything if you want to. Hey, maybe we'll get lucky and HP will do to Compaq what Compaq did to DEC... Just wishful thinking I suppose.

Their image search sucks too

[NaveWeiss]

Compare searching for "Mahoromatic", an anime which has been around for long (it kinda sucks though, like most anime serieses). Google returns 87 results of the cute maid, while Altavista returns 0 results - they obviously need to do some serious spidering around.

Is my post interesting or what?

Re:Their image search sucks too

[afree87]

Mahoromatic sucks, but "Mahoro de Mambo" is an excellent song.

Re:Their image search sucks too

[NaveWeiss]

It doesn't exactly suck.. it has some nice episodes and great animation, but the whole idea kinda makes me nauseous.

The ending song is indeed lovely. I play it in my car... (don't ask ;)

Google Wins

[punkfoo]

Pwefewences: You can search the web in Ewmew Fudd or Pig Latin.

The main reason I used Altavista

[Bobulusman]

back in the day was the neat way you could use Babelfish to get around the school firewall. Just set it to translate from X->English. Worked a lot better when the languages had less words in common.

And before anyone makes any pr0n jokes, this was something that NEEDED to be done. My high schools firewall was overly sensitive and based upon keywords. Imagine my trouble finding a web site on the Trojan War!(This was back before we got an ISP at home.)

Google is becoming a ruthless monopoly

[registro]

Well, one thing is for sure: Google is no longer playing nice about which sites are displayed first, The new Google is about selling AdWords space, no fair displaying.

This is something that is not well known to most of you, so let me explain:

Google seems to be randomising results on commercial categories, in order to force commercial sites to pay Adwords to be on top. The sites that used to be on top, the most popular sites, are no longer there.
We have been tracking the cats and keywords affected by the randomised effect since September, keyword showing different, degraded, results with each reload. We have found most competitive travel, hotel and adult related keywords seem to be randomised. The result? Sites have been suddenly deprived of their legitimated traffic, and are been forced to pay AdWords, Google Sponsor programs to survive.

Just one example. A we are following a keyword that used to have 10.000.000 result before the September Google Algorithm update ( the so call Adwords Update). Since 10/300/02 the keyword showing a only 6.000.000 results 25% of the time. Sometimes it has anything between 170.000 and 200.000 results, and 35% of the time it only list 142.000 sites, and the results are pure junk: the top 10 sites are sites without a domain name (only the ip), sites with "Fireworks Splice HTML" as the only text on it, and control panel sites with a "Personalise Your Home Page" title on it. The result? Sites have been suddenly deprived of their legitimated trafic, and are been forced to pay AdWords, Google Sponsor programs to survive.

Belief me, this Altavista move is VERY WELCOME from the webmaster community. Google is handling 90% of the no-MSN queries now. It is very close to became a monopoly, and it's last two month behaviour shows it in not going to be a "good hearted" monopoly, if such a thing exist.

Re:Google is becoming a ruthless monopoly

[Mike Schiraldi]

Sites have been suddenly deprived of their legitimated traffic, and are been forced to pay AdWords, Google Sponsor programs to survive.

I'm not sure what the word "legitimated" means, but you make it sound like web sites are entitled to their Google ranking. Google can do whatever they want. As long as its users are happy with their search results, capitalism is working the way it should.

Instead of being mad at Google for wanting to be paid money for driving more traffic to your site (you other option being to do nothing and still have Google drive slightly less traffic to your site, for free), you should be thanking them for years of sending you customers for free.

Re:Google is becoming a ruthless monopoly

[PhoenxHwk]

I've definitely noticed the effects of this update on some of my searches. There is one website that I tend to use a lot (from many different computers), and I used to be able to get it as the #1 google result with a fairly simple search. All of a sudden, it has moved to #7 with a bunch of absolute crap before it. Sucks. However, none of them seem to be there because of ads. Perhaps its some sort of algorithm change that has also affected standard results?

Re:Google is becoming a ruthless monopoly

[Anonymous Coward]

Not that I agree with the guy complaining about losing his top listings, but the double standards on Slashdot is breathtaking: When Altavista sells listings, they are selling out, when Google does it, it's just economics and capitalism.

Get a grip on your google cheerleading, morons.

Re:Google is becoming a ruthless monopoly

[Anonymous Coward]

The problem is, that their PageRank algorithms are patented and they can hold and extend their monopoly... Here we've another example of the effects of patents...

Re:Google is becoming a ruthless monopoly

[Anonymous Coward]

Google randomizing its search results on commercial categories is a GOOD thing. It reduces the incentive to try to break PageRank and fool google into ranking your site #1. Also, it stimulates competition by not allowing any one site to dominate the rankings. If the way google is doing it degrades their results significantly, that's a bug in their algorithms, not an indication of malice. And if your site was #1 before, stop whining. The guys at #2 and #3 are probably much happier now and competition will be better off for it. You'll just have to make your offerings that much better than your competitors' instead of relying on your #1 placement (which is probably arbitrary and not a good indicator of quality compared to closely ranked sites) to generate traffic.

Re:Google is becoming a ruthless monopoly

[Mike Schiraldi]

I know! The double-standards are mind-boggling! One day, Slashdot hive mind says it prefers emacs, and the next day, they prefer vi! It's amazing that you can hear different things from different people sometimes!

Re:Google is becoming a ruthless monopoly

[Anonymous Coward]

(Ruthless monopoly? You deserve to be shot. Look on yahoo for "unethical business", then look on google. Google cares =P)

If you spend more time doing a job you care about, or creating websites you actually care about, and less time on SEO (Search Engine Optimizing), you wouldn't be whining now.

Legitimate traffic? Google has the righht to do whatever they want to do, you're just so used to that parasitic relationship you think it's a right you have. BAH.

The net would be a better place without all those cheap salesman spam SEO sites. If sites like these go down because of google, well... sucks to be you, YAY FOR US!

Re:Google is becoming a ruthless monopoly

[HaggiZ]

Bleh! Google AdWords have been around for months now (as I requested costing and almost used them myself at the start of this year). AdWord results are quite clearly displayed at the top of the page in a different colour, or down the right hand side (can't remember which one was which on the costings originally sent).

Quit your whining, you'll still get the same service just scroll down two lines.

For the record, Ebay seems to have bought a tonne of them as they almost always come up on my searches

Re:Google is becoming a ruthless monopoly

[lpq]

"legitimate", in context of "search engine", in context of reputation for returning results that users have found to be most useful, as applied to results:

Something that does just that. If sites can buy their way to the top,it distorts user preference.

If users are "happy" with their results: define "happy"? Is it something that can be objectively measured? At what point does the frog slowly heated in water notice that the water is too hot?

Capitalism doesn't promote 'best' nor 'diversity' -- just most popular as indicated by those with most capital.

All that aside, an exercise for readers: Describe how one would create a search engine and support its operation in a way that doesn't taint results based on money.

-lpq

Thanks

[Anonymous Coward]

For the link - it made it so easy to find Slashdot. Why can't more of you take the time to provide links?

its just as bad as before

[paradesign]

try and submit your site, theres only one free option. there are three paid placement potions including a cost per click solution. Bull shit!

i know these places need to make money, but i sure makes it hard for struggling sites to be seen, especially since i pay out of my pocket for hosting to keep it ad free. this is why i love google, its bot is always on my site, and im even starting to come up in the rusults on certain search terms, thanks to a fair ranking system.

What would really rock...

[dotgod]

is if we had a search engine that used a moderation system for the website matches.

So now I'm an old fart...

[MadFarmAnimalz]

if I can remember when altavista was king?

Sheesh. In a 2 or three years it's probably going to be like "you're and old fart if you remember way back when Pete Sampras was actually hitting returns".

Hey, young 'uns, what's your life cycle like? Us, we live to be like 70 or 80...

Re:Alternate Solutions.

[The Cydonian]

Google is so much better, so why should Altavista survive in the long run?

While I agree with you on Google giving a much better service, I do believe there's a space for Altavista, Alltheweb and (hopefully) scores of other search engines as well. The reason is simple:- more than ads (television, pop-up or otherwise), it's search engines that uniquely determine how we browse the net. Sure, so far Google has *largely* been Good (tm), but that doesn't mean it will continue to be so. In particular, I'm concerned about the way results are arranged in Google (or any search engine); there's no accountability, nothing's open, there's only a vague comment about how The Algo gives PageRanks to each individual page. As we saw earlier, Google has taken results *without* publicly announcing that it's doing so.

Indeed, Alltheweb, in particular, sounds promising. It has more indexed documents with a faster "refresh cycle" than Google, a video, mp3, and a ftp search, and also says it can search through Flash movies. Of course, no way it can replace Google Groups, but all the same, it's definitely a viable alternative to Google. I believe we should welcome greater competition among search engines.

Free-market competition will help us avoid unduely relying on a single company. For Google's sake, I don't want it turn into a monopoly.

OT Hotbot

[vicviper]

I searched for 'google' at hotbot.com, and the first entry returned is for lycos.

Re:OT Hotbot

[Nomad37]

i just tried the same query on altavista Australia: it doesn't return google on the first page at all...

Re:Advanced Search

[The Cydonian]

Have you tried Google's Advanced Search?

Sneaky updates.

[Inoshiro]

While Google seems to have removed its per link click code (which I filtered with Privoxy anyways), they still have the Javascript at the top meant to hide it from the status bar:

function ss(w){window.status=w;return true;}
function cs(){window.status='';}
function ga(o,e){if (document.getElementById){a=o.id.substring(1); p = "";r = "";g = e.target;if (g) {
+ t = g.id;f = g.parentNode;if (f) {p = f.id;h = f.parentNode;if (h) r = h.id;}} else{h = e.srcElement
+;f = h.parentNode;if (f) p = f.id;t = h.id;}if (t==a || p==a || r==a) return true;location.href=document.getElementById(a).href }}

Maybe they only turn on the indiviual link checking sometimes, perhaps with a random sample?

Re:Sneaky updates.

[Anonymous Coward]

"Hide it from the status bar" ?

Again, Mozilla has an option to disable javascripts' ability to change your status bar...

Boohoo

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't blame Google, blame yourself. They owe nothing to you. They offer a free service to searchers, and as long as the service is good, searchers will visit (ask AltaVista about what heppens when your search turns to crap.)

Google is not a monopoly, since there are still numerous other search engines. People simply don't use them because most of the time, they're pretty bad. If you have to depend on Google for search traffic, then you really need to think about the fact you're that dependant on Google for your business model.

Goddamn SWOOSHES!

[Kenshin]

AltaVista's Marketing Committee:

"Gee, we need a new logo so people know we've changed."

"Hey, let's get rid of that nice mountain range, the works with the 'high view' meaning of our name, and give it SWOOSHES!"

"Great! Every other company has swooshes in their logos, so they must work!"

ARGH!!!

Am I the ONLY person who's sick and tired of all these goddamn swoosh logos?

Re:Goddamn SWOOSHES!

[Anonymous Coward]

Am I the ONLY person who's sick and tired of all these goddamn swoosh logos?

Probably not. Though, the new logo could have been even more cliched... with SWIRLS! =)

Re:Goddamn SWOOSHES!

[jesser]

No, you're not the only person who's tired of swoosh logos. The folks at 37 Signals who brought you eNormicom were tired of them back in Dec 2000.

Forced localization

[jetmarc]

I live in Spain, but barely speak spanish. However, "www.altavista.com" detects my IP and forces me over to "es.altavista.com" which

a) has the screen mask translated to spanish, and

b) defaults to find only spanish content.

This is annoying, because there are not many spanish documents about embedded software development, and those few that exist are very difficult for me to read.

I won't give AV a chance, for this very reason. The necessity to configure the search engine again and again is just too inconvenient. Google is so much easier to use.

Marc

PS: I though the internet was international :(

Re:Forced localization

[jawtheshark]

Well, I know the problem. I had the same problem: at work google kept pointing to www.google.fr in French. Even though I know french, I hate it when it does that: I wany my webpages in english and nothing else.
Anyway, if you use Internet Explorer (as I do at work), you just need to change the "Language" preference in the options. Mozilla has a similar functionaliyt as does Opera. Put English in top, and you're okay. Well, it fixed my problem with google.

I hate localization: I've never seen it done well, not in Windows, not in Java, not in Mac OS X. For some reason all programs expect you to talk French is you set your locale to "French". It is insane, since the localizaion should really just inpact the formatting of dates, time, currencies and numbers... not the language. I now always select the United Kindom locale and cutomize the formatting to my liking.
The first time I got in touch with localization was when Oracle ported their tools to Java. I fired up enterprise manager and in the menubar it said "Le Fichier" instead of "File". From that point on, my faith in localization was lost.

Re:Forced localization

[timmyf2371]

I get this very problem as I like in the UK so i get "uk.altavista.com".

If you try:
http://us.altavista.com or
http://uk.altavista.com

then you'll be able to access the English versions. I believe you can also set cookies.

Tim

Re:Forced localization

[jetmarc]

> http://us.altavista.com [altavista.com]

Thanks for this hint. The screen display is english now, but unfortunately the default search space is set to "english, spanish" instead of "all languages". Better than "spanish only", but still not the real beef.

Re:Forced localization

[Anonymous Coward]

When in Rome, you fucking ignoramus.

omg! video search!

[muzzy]

and it even has adult categories by default! the porn video search engine? and i can type in "metallica" to the audio/mp3 search, ooh aah! oh the joy :)

altavista.digital.com

[dead_penguin]

Wow.

Just the other day I was looking through the bookmarks I have saved in Lynx on an old shell account. The search engines I'd bookmarked were Lycos as lycos.cs.cmu.edu and Altavista as altavista.digital.com. Neither of them had a www at the start, and both still resolve today.

Unfortunately the same can't be said for some of the gopher:// links I had in there too. :(
We've come a long way in a very short time...

Re:AltaVista vs. Google: speed and relevance shoot

[nbvb]

Completely unrelated, but try a search on google for "stoner girl" and look at what the third result is ...

How did THAT get there????

Seriously, how did it get there?

--NBVB

I'm so tired of the "sold out" complaints...

[NDPTAL85]

I guess its only the grownups and adults who can realize that at the end of the day putting a Lexus in your garage or being able to pay for private school tuition for all of your children (i.e. becoming financially independent) is a wee bit more important than "keeping it real" for some lame whiny high maintanence community.

In case anyone is wondering, no I'm not being sarcastic.

Re:I'm so tired of the "sold out" complaints...

[cduffy]

More important than "keeping it real" for a bunch of whiners, absolutely. More important than being able to respect my own actions, no.

Personally, I don't want a Lexus and have a strong distaste for private schools. I do want a house of my own in a decent neighborhood, and enough financial independance so as not to be worried about losing my job tomorrow... but that's secondary. When I work, I do so because I want the world to be a better place -- because I want to fix a problem someone's having, or build a useful tool, or whatever. Getting paid is a very nice side effect of that, and necessary to the extent that it pays for food and medical care and helps me buy that house I want -- but it's not why I write code, and I'm not going to go do something impolite (like breaking my verbal promise to extend a free license on my online voting system to the CSU system, for instance) just because it'll help me buy a fancier vehicle or live in a swankier neighborhood.

If that makes me childish, so be it -- I'm a big, happy child, and latter bit's important to me. I'm not claiming that you should behave any differently -- but don't insult me by claiming that anyone whose priorities are different than yours is being a silly fool.

Re:I'm so tired of the "sold out" complaints...

[NDPTAL85]

I understand where you're coming from. Basically you want to be the good guy before you're the pragmatic guy. But did you see one of today's Slashdot stories?
http://ask.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=0 2/11/13/13 3223&mode=nested&tid=163
"Re-Tooling Your Skills for the Future?"

Read the posts. There's a bunch of IT workers now looking for work because the market sucks for them. IT skills go bad real fast. You have to make your money in this business fast and quick so you can have the LUXURY of being the good guy later on. Otherwise you're stuck on an endless treadmill that will eventually wear your nice guy ass out.

Re:I'm so tired of the "sold out" complaints...

[cduffy]

I know a few old-time AIX hackers who've been on the treadmill for most of their lives, and are still happy at it. I know a lot of old-time embedded systems hackers with gray hair and in-demand job skills. And we all get along really well, because in terms of how we think, I'm like them.

My nice guy ass is in it for the long haul, because I love what I do -- and the change and development as part of it. And because of that, I don't need to get rich quick and then cash out. If you dislike what you do so much that you plan on wearing out, or if you don't think you have the stamina to keep learning new job skills 20 years later, then maybe you should be taking a different approach... but I like my approach, and it Works For Me.

Re:I'm so tired of the "sold out" complaints...

[NDPTAL85]

Don't worry, I jumped off the tech bandwagon a while ago. As for those grey hairs, well they're the lucky ones. With all the cries of ageism in this industry they cannot consider themselves anything but lucky. Its not about stamina. Its about reasonableness. IT is an unreasonable demanding industry staffed by people who think they're supermen who are proud of the long hours management manages to squeeze out of them.

Re:I'm so tired of the "sold out" complaints...

[cduffy]

IT is an unreasonable demanding industry staffed by people who think they're supermen who are proud of the long hours management manages to squeeze out of them.

Most of IT. Not all of it. There really do exist software companies where most of the folks put in extra hours only if they want to (or if there's a release deadline coming up... but that's not the common case) and where the engineering management has the mindset that their job is to support the engineers (as opposed to herding them). It's also that same place (an embedded Linux house which has been on /. more than a few times, and which isn't Lineo) where I met most of the grey hairs. Being there is also how I learned that I wasn't (and am not) superman -- though I'd argue that some of my coworkers there qualify -- mostly by observing the skills of my colleagues.

I'd probably still be working there if I hadn't gotten fed up with the bay area and left for Austin; if I can find an employer of similar quality here, I'll be greatly pleased.

My point is, though, that not all tech jobs suck. Finding the good ones... yah, it's hard... but the really good jobs are truly golden.

Google ranking

[jetmarc]

For quite a while, Googles ranking system could be "cheated" by supplying links in usenet postings. I had a link to my page in my usenet signature for a few weeks, and it became #1 although the page was an excellent example of how to design a page NOT to be found by search engines.

You mean like the open directory project?

[Anonymous Coward]

http://dmoz.org/

Google uses it too.

Re:You mean like the open directory project?

[mgkimsal2]

Not quite - it's sort of moderation, but the quality of the moderation varies, is filtered through just a few people, and isn't terribly 'real time'. I'm not suggesting things should be instantaneous, but trying to have stuff added/deleted from dmoz is often a more lengthy process than getting into many other search engines. And if you piss off an editor, you're hosed.

Does anyone remember when alta vista was the best?

[blitzrage]

I DO! :)

I loved it, but then I found google like everyone else. I never got into yahoo. I actually remember when lycos was the best search engine. Ahhhh... Good times :)

Re:Sneaky Links & Hotmail

[paranoic]

Hotmail has been doing this forever. They rewrite links in your email messages. Which makes one wonder, what else are they doing with your email?

A question for you

[Anonymous Coward]

How much would you pay for month to use Google?

If you don't want to pay, then you have not realized what it's all about either.

Re:A question for you

[NDPTAL85]

I already pay. By seeing advertisements I am bringing them ad revenue that allows them to function.

Re:AltaVista vs. Google: speed and relevance shoot

[Anonymous Coward]

OMG that chit is funny.

Shut up

[Anonymous Coward]

I like swooshes.

Re: Baloney

[Animats]

I don't see this happening. I tried searching Google repeatedly for "cars", "cell phone", "viagra", "sex", and "london hotels", which seems to cover a broad range of saleable stuff. The same results appeared on each reload. What's this guy selling?

Besides, it's quite reasonable for Google to randomize results for roughly equal-valued matches.

Re:AltaVista vs. Google: speed and relevance shoot

[3-State Bit]

Google is fast, returning the first results page instantly, no matter what.
Wrong. I made google perform a 27 second search (this time length was returned in the search result) by writing a script to find the longest string in the complete works of shakespeare made up entirely of stop words. Entering the stop-words in the format {"+1 +2 +3 +4"} -- the quotation marks are part of the search -- made Google all but croak. It's cuz' it had to merge the list-of-all-sites that 1 appears on with ditto 2 with ditto 3, etc.
Fun stuff.
(Also: the search became cached instantly, and NEVER again took very long.)

Uh, yeah...

[Anonymous Coward]

And the opening page

http://it.altavista.com/
Told me that I could go to a site that I could access using a stinky dialer, a website for clueless dotcomers who still not know what happened to "new economy", another site, another and another one sponsored by the same shitty criminal company called CEPU (which supposedly tries to help you with preparing the university exam, but in truth is only an high cost scam) and last, but not leasta dialer-porn-website...

If you think I'll be abandoning Google, you are absolutely wrong.

Re:AltaVista vs. Google: speed and relevance shoot

[Graabein]

> Where are the freakin' cats?!

They're there on both Google and Altavista, page 3 and 4 of the results, respectively. But you have a point, no wonder they're "near endangered" when they hardly turn up in a web search at all. ;-)

Here ya go: Jaguar Panthera onca. And here, and here, for starters.

When Astalavista was the best,

[user no. 590291]

d|i|g|i|t|a|l was a company that still had technical merit, before it was swallowed up by the vermin at Compaq that set out to destroy all vestiges of the former great computer maker, such as ftp.digital.com.

Today, astalavista.com is the best!

why altavista became sucky

[iggymanz]

cmgi acquired it, and the upper management morons of cmgi only know how to acquire, bleed and destroy companies, with no long term business plan other than to just waste the stock holders money buying more companies in the hopes they blunder into something good. Now cmgi is liquidating their companies as their cash pile dwindles to zero...maybe Altavista will get lucky and be sold off to someone who knows what to do with it.

Beat that Google? Um, OK...

[TrentC]

Well, for one, there's this nifty Search pane in my web browser of choice that I can just flip open.

Then, for those using that other web browser, you can add a toolbar to your browser window.

If you're running your own site, you can roll your own Google interface.

I'll be checking out the new AltaVista for a while, but I can't see anyone displacing Google as my search engine of choice for a while...

Jay (=

I remember

[Anonymous Coward]

Great search engines, like the one in Trondheim Norway that eventuslly morphed into AllTheWeb, are all from the days gone by. It seems like when ever there is a decent service on the web, commercial interests throw money at the technology and purchase it, only to make it worse, not better. I would love to see the old search engines back and would even give each one a dollar, USD for a donation. Imagine 500 million folks coughing up a dollar for the developers! I would spend 5 dollars and reap the benefits. Unfortunately, this would not happen, due to the cheapskates who use the web. Fuck you all, cheap bastards.

ATTENTION MODERATORS ON CRACK

[Anonymous Coward]

Why is this simply -1 overrated? It may express a point you don't agree with (company with large market share != monopoly) but it is not overrated. Have the intestinal fortitude to moderate fairly, or get lost.

Re:AltaVista vs. Google: speed and relevance shoot

[Anonymous Coward]

If you hit the google cache for that page, it'll tell you that your search terms only appear in pages that link to that page. So someone (or many people) with a fairly popular site must be linking to that page with "Stoner Girl" as the link.

Now to find them...

Re:AltaVista vs. Google: speed and relevance shoot

[Xemoka]

Okay... while i was reading your little post i remembered about a little search engine bought out by ASK.com.. thats right.. teoma.com a not so shabby search engine.. well i ran your test with teoma vs googlel... and well.. Teoma took about 3 seconds and jag-lovers.org was the second one from the top and OS X came up on the third page under RESOURCES not under Resaults. i also found the same thing as you with google..

Unicode Support, and more

[n9fzx]

Not sure what you're doing wrong, but the database itself supports Unicode as well as all of the Asian encodings (JIS, etc.). Make sure that you're using the appropriate front end for the encoding -- note the drop-down menu in the upper right hand corner.

-=paulf

I Remember..

[Suppafly]

I remember when altavista used to be the best, but then some where along the line, they apparently decided to stop indexing new pages or something.

Don't winge here - send google feedback

[Anonymous Coward]

At the bottom of every search result on google (below the goooooooooooogle bit, and right above the blue line), there is a link that you can click on if you are "Dissatisfied with your search results". It sends you to a form that you can fill in, and lets you enter the URL you expected to find.

If you are right that google is returning a load of crap before something on-topic, then don't wingle about it on slashdot - let google know!

Bullshit

[Flamerule]

Google is a ruthless monopoly? You sound like the SearchKing.

A we are following a keyword that used to have ...

Yeah, I notice you don't actually tell us what that keyword is.

Sites have been suddenly deprived of their legitimated trafic ...

As others have pointed out, there is no such thing as a "legitimate" amount of traffic that Google has to drive to your site.

Re:Bullshit

[Anonymous Coward]

I suspect that each of this guy's web pages have 500 word meta tags.

Real AltaVista History

[n9fzx]

It always amazes me how history gets munged in the retelling. For example, the lunch meeting I had with Louis Monier and Joella Paquette (Left at Albuquerque) was actually the second or third meeting I'd had with Joella about "Alto Vista", and it was the first time I'd met Louis. There was no napkin involved. Or that the name came from a half-erased chalkboard: actually, it came from the award plaqques in Joella's office; when she asked me to code the name the project, I looked at the placques, chose the word "Alto" from "Palo Alto" and first "View" from "Mountain View", which we immediately changed to the Spanish "Vista". Louis' wife corrected the feminisation error a few weeks later, and the project settled into "Alta Vista". The whole idea was to build a search engine to demonstrate that DEC could do things with Alpha and the Internet that nobody else could.

Louis did the crawler code (known now as "scooter") and was the prefect person to do the job right, as he's a graph theorist by nature and had just finished working on a massive threads debugging tool. Chuck Thacker then suggested that we talk to Mike Burrows over at SRC, who had a wonderful full text database, which Louis and I concluded would work far better than my original idea (using Oracle). So Mike did the database code. I did the first (crude) web-based UI for Mike's code, and even with Louis' first crawl, it was amazing what we could do (relative to the other seach tools of the time). My other chore as "hardware guy" was to spec out the first AlphaServer 8400 that we would get to run the demo. There was a huge backlog of 8400 orders at the time, and only about a half dozen of DEC's techs were trained and authorized to work on them.

AltaVista's initial triumph was simple -- the database held ten times more pages than anything else, and also indexed all of the words in the pages. And yet the response time was nearly instantaneous. Keeping it that way for the first few weeks required a DEC VP to drive several CPU cards through a Boston blizzard to be Fedexed out to Palo Alto, as well as a lot of long hours by the team to diagnose and defend against a number of attacks.

Two things ultimately kept AltaVista from leveraging its early successes. First, DEC wouldn't part with the necessary capital -- as it turned out later, they were negotiating to be bought by Compaq. And secondly, when DEC was finally bought by Compaq, the latter had no idea what to do with AltaVista. The "portal" strategy was designed to maximize the IPO valuation, exactly what investors wanted in 1999. Large amounts of cash were spent on that strategy, only to have the DotCom Bomb go off a week before the IPO.

It's remarkable and I'm gratified to see that AltaVista managed to survive and transition to its roots.

-=paulf

Re:Real AltaVista History

[Anonymous Coward]

Paul's post should be rated a 6, and all the other stupid comments should be deleted. SD is a waste of time, especially if Paul's comments don't get filtered into the 5 level.

Google is losing its touch

[Anonymous Coward]

I am eagerly awaiting a new search engine to topple Google. Google has pretty much degraded into what yahoo.com has become in terms of searches. I think a shakeup is in good order.

These days when I search for something on google, most of the results coming up are either reviews or places to buy a product rather then other things I am specifically looking for.

Still won't use it . . .

[Anonymous Coward]

As long as I have to scroll down half of a page just to get to the actual results, I'm not going to use it. Having sponsored results that are nearly identical to the search results is not the way to win the users back. Google has sponsored links, but they are to the side, small, and obviously different. Although there was a really nice description of how Google has sold out (that I really didn't understand, but am willing to believe), I'm still going to use it for 99% of the searches I do.

Simple Test

[abburdlen]

Try searching Google for altavista.
Now try searching altavista for google.

Sort of obvious which is the better search engine.

Google's still MUCH faster too.

[walt-sjc]

Going to the main page (after flushing my caches) google still loads MUCH faster. Searches return faster too.

If you want to compete, you have to offer something either different, or better, or both. AV doesn't do anything better that I can see, and they are still just a search engine with ads.

I also notice that the cached results tend to be older with AV. They REALLY need to address that if they want to compete.

So what the ehll is going on at AV? If they are going to "reinvent" themselves, you think that they would actually try and do something BETTER than the competition, not just be a "me too."

They changed the logo again!

[Anonymous Coward]

I can't believe it! They changed the logo again! It will never be the same again without the mountain thingy.

Yes.

[Anonymous Coward]

I remember.

Re:AltaVista vs. Google: speed and relevance shoot

[jandrese]

Have you ever seen that ad? She looks like she took a huge hit right before it started, and then starts getting all spacy with the beep noises.

Oh dear...

[JohnnyBigodes]

Altavista lists my country (Portugal) as "Portugual" in the worldwide/ search. 'Nuff said :)

Re:AltaVista vs. Google: speed and relevance shoot

[quantaman]

How did THAT get there????

I'm not sure but don't you want to switch now?

They can't match Google on bandwidth

[Plug]

All I can say is from where I sit (quite far ahead of a Slashdotting normally; it's morning in the first timezone in the world, GMT+13), Alta Vista seems to be down.

A search engine that can't take a /.'ing. We normally point people to search engines when other sites are /.'d. More bandwidth please AV!

Re:They can't match Google on bandwidth

[slasher guy]

It works for me. (I've still got it under my 'home' button)

Google goes political

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't know everything it now censors but if a site contains anything critical of Israel or tells the Palestinian side, only the first page is found but the site is not indexed.

The least google could do is publically state its censorship policy.

Ahh!

[clubin]

Since when was AltaVista so ugly? Did you see the aliased new logo?

It was my favorite search engine perhaps 5 years ago, but I don't remember it being nearly as ugly.

The reason I went to google from yahoo

[ModernGeek]

I left yahoo about a year back, it just got too sick and bloated for me, and google has such a clean interface. When I goto yahoo.com I get DHTML and flash ads for Britney Spears asking me to drink some pepsi. The only ads I get on google are little ones to the left and top, and they are relevant to what I am asking for, when I am looking for a good UNIX host, chances are, I don't want a pepsi.

If you think that's good, try this!

[Anonymous Coward]

Search on images.google.com for cleavage.

The first image is from a link in a Score:5 comment on a famous slashdot story. See if you can guess which story without looking.

Re:If you think that's good, try this!

[Anonymous Coward]

'Kathleen Fent, Will You Marry Me' story?

Re:AltaVista vs. Google: speed and relevance shoot

[serlaten]

Google's rankings are based on how many people are linking to a certain site, and what words are used in the link. So if someone links to the Ellen Feiss site, referring to her as "Stoner girl", google will notice and display that site when someone searches for stoner girl. For fun: make 1000 pages linking to one of your friends' pages using the sentence "crack addicted donkey fucker". Then, some weeks later, send him an email telling him to search for the very same sentence.

Re:AltaVista vs. Google: speed and relevance shoot

[j7953]

Completely unrelated, but try a search on google for "stoner girl" and look at what the third result is ...

How did THAT get there????

Well, since "stoned girl" returns the same page as the third result, ....

Think Stoned

google still more features

[demmer]

av: useless mp3 search google: directory and good ol' deja-news data also the layout of the search results is much better in google... i dont want to read thw hole page of results! in google i see very fast how good a result was with that big headline and interesting parts of text below... AND the maybe best feature: google cache! with that everchanging damn dynamics in todays web information saved to be found is very important.

Doesn't Validate!

[HealYourChurchWebSit]

You'd think if they took to time to rewrite the sucker, that'd they at least take the time to VALIDATE it!

Re:Doesn't Validate!

[beanerspace]

Your example is a bit disturbing ... in that they don't declare a DOCTYPE at all!

That said, when I want ahead and chose 4.01 Transitional for them, it got back almot 4 dozen HTML errors. Similar results for other DocTypes as well. OOOFTA!

Altavista was teh b0mb (-20,Offtopic,User sUxx0r)

[Alari]

:>

Really. It still is pretty decent, though I find I use Google and others more now..

Open Directory Project beats the pants off Yahoo for topic/category searches.

Alari

Re: Baloney

[registro]

I'm speechless, they stopped.
Just for the record, "london hotels" was one of them, but it stopped dancing today, just like 20 more keyword we where following.
It must be a coincidence, but those searches where changing since last 10/30/02 until 6 hours ago, when Slashdot published the Altavista article.
Im tempted to think this is a new form of slashdot effect.

No is not

[registro]

> notice you don't actually tell us what that >keyword is No, I don't, because that would we rude, and because that particular keyword or our particular problem, if any,is irrelevant. It is just an example that must be independly confirmed by others in other cases and other keywords. >As others have pointed out, there is no such >thing as a "legitimate" amount of traffic that >Google has to drive to your site. Yes, there is. Hundreds of users look daily for "Nasa", or "playboy", and Google, a search tool, is expected to provide them with the relevant results, not with irrelevant, pay results. If you look for a movie cinema playing "Red Dragon" in your local city guide, you are expecting to be sent to see that movie, no ending up in downtown brothel with red lights in front of a Chinese restaurant. If they do it by mistake, well, fine I guess. But the truth is it was working fine two month ago, just before they started billing AdWords by click-through, instead of just for viewing. It started when its Adwords business model started to compete with the Good Relevance model: the worst the results, the higher the chance customers will click trough the advertisement, and the higher the pressure for webmasters to pay AdWords to show up again

Very simple reasons google will remain #1

[LucidityZero]

Altavista is difficult to type. Although I used the search engine for years and years (and sometimes even still find myself typing www.altavista.digital.com - lol) typing google.com takes half the time. Your fingers just slide over it. Google will remain #1 for this reason alone. :)

Re:Very simple reasons google will remain #1

[AlXtreme]

www.av.com ;)

Re:Very simple reasons google will remain #1

[RapDoggy]

type in the bar: google
and press CTRL + ENTER ;)

Re: Oh joy.

[Anonymous Coward]

The top results don't seem as relevant as googles, even though they don't appear to be commerically biased. Overall, the improvements still don't seem earth shattering. If you want to try a truly new way to surf the web, you should check out stumbleupon. Finding webpages based on personalized, correlated profiles seems to make much more sense than the generic search paradigm that is so common today.

Googlefight tells the story...

[laeraun2]

Number of results on Google for the keywords altavista and google:

altavista
(4 130 000 results) versus
google
(12 400 000 results)

The winner is: google

sure it may be a bit biased but hey!

Bad Move

[tgibson]

Yes, this was a horrible move. One way to really screw up your branding is to change the brand (so to speak). Changing a known URL is bad. Changing it to something longer, and compelling people to go to the longer address when they've entered the shorter, known address is just silly.

Chunked transfer method? Hello?

[J'raxis]

Looks like Altavista has a problem understanding the chunked HTTP transfer-encoding method. I went to look at my own results, and scattered throughout the description of my page are 3-digit hexadecimal numbers.

In a page downloaded via "chunked" transfer-encoding, the response body is broken down into small chunks, each chunk being prefixed by their length, represented as a three-digit hexadecimal number. The three chunk-lengths AV is showing as text are c45, 138, and fe4. Telnetting to my site by hand confirmed that these are the first three chunk sizes Apache is using.

Wayback Machine Memories

[tgibson]

Some of the older faces of altavista
Wayback Machine view of AltaVista
Lot's of good stuff on the old homepages, such as how popular it is and accolades it's received.

Down the tubes

[Beautyon]

I'm not sure what the word "legitimated" means, but you make it sound like web sites are entitled to their Google ranking. Google can do whatever they want.

And if they did not become innovative with the results, Adwords failed and they went off line, everyone would either be whining or spouting some self riteous darwinian garbage about how they didnt "deserve" to survive.

You dont have to imagine hard about how the world would be without Google; just look at Daypop, which is struggling to stay alive. Its offline now, and its service is sorely missed.

You cant have it both ways. Either Google finds a way to survive, or it dies. If you have a better solution to how it can stay alive without manipulating its results, then give us the answer or shut up.

I remember...

[Wheaty18]

I remember when AltaVista was the best search engine (sometime back in 1997, I think). I used to use it exclusively, but then switched to google.

Didn't get your ranking?

[0x0d0a]

Complaints of bogus Google rankings are, I think, quite entertaining. What, AltaVista ranked your site higher than Google?

See, Google is a really unique entity. Most successful companies are driven by business types, suits. Google is a big collection of computer scientists doing research, and taking a no-compromises approach to product quality. They decided to go for long-term value -- having happy, well-served customers, instead of the many sites that went with pop-up ads, corporate tie-ins, sponsored portal links and the like during the dot-com era to boost short-term profit.

As a result, Google is on top. And they got on top by doing the Right Thing, unlike almost everyone else in the industry. It's an excellent example of the quality-through-competition-and-enormous-market that Internet visionary types have been trumpeting since the dawn of the Internet.

Of course, not everyone is happy about this. Competing search engines, the ones that frequently have far more money backing them, yet still can't keep up, complain bitterly. The marketing types that used to be able to trick the simple algorithms the old search engines used, or buy positioning in the searches, can no longer do that. I constantly hear bitter complaining about that as well.

But you know what? Despite all the mudslinging I've seen from these types, I've yet to see Google blow up yet. They consistently provide near-magical search accuracy, finding what I'm looking for. They have a simple interface that is built around what the Web was intended to look like (i.e. not pixel-positioned, invisible-table-laden crap). They cost me nothing, other than a few simple text based ads (which are small and have helped me occasionally). Google is absolutely incredible. They happened to be in the right position at the right time, and as consumers flock happily to using Google rather than remembering DNS entries for websites, a lot of companies feel unsettled. In their traditional world, they could *buy* a DNS name for a load of money. They could sue anyone with a competing name. All of a sudden, they're thrown into a world where *they may have to compete for recognition with their smaller competitors*. It's what the Internet had promised for ages -- the ability of the little business to compete with the large one, where incumbents have no inherent advantage. A lot of companies dislike this intensely, hence all the bogus lawsuites and claims of falsifying search results that Google has made.

Google has always claimed that they wouldn't muck with search result ordering because it would cause customers to move away from their then-inferior product. I think that they're true to that, but it doesn't matter -- if they aren't, eventually people will migrate to whatever better search engine pops up. The sort of folks at Google understand trends and systemwide numerical movements based on small factors -- I doubt they'd make an argument like this without it being reasonable.

Google has even put out a whitepaper describing how their search engine works.

So we have a free service that has lesser ads than almost any commercial website, has uncanny accuracy, does *not* (unlike rivals who openly sell them) sell page rankings, has a science/engineering culture (instead of a business one), and is fantastically successful.

Finally, Google is under no onus to do anything. They are not a meaningful monopoly. The entire point of a monopoly is that you can erect barriers to competition by using your clout. You can always easily go to another website, and Google even published a fair bit of the foundational technology in their engine. You can't really go much further than they did to be open, free, and competitive. The point is that they have a superior product, and they are unwilling to screw their customers over to gain short-term bucks.

Contrast this to Microsoft, where you have a vast array of monopolies, compatibility and technical information issues that are visciously used to guard their markets, secrecy, inferior products, and a willingness to gouge the customer and do everything possible to keep them in line. And yet, Microsoft gets a slap on the wrist. If that's acceptable, Google sure as hell is.

When I search for "Altavista" on Google, I get Altavista. When I get something else, *then* I'll start being suspicious.

Finally, you claim that Google returns poor search results. I disagree. I have found that Google consistently returns the most useful results of any search engine I've used, and does a fantastic job of shoving "junk" results well after the "useful" results.

Re:Didn't get your ranking?

[Deven]

Kudos! You've pretty much summed up most of the reasons why I love Google. As far as I'm concerned, they've proven themselves sufficiently over the years that I will give them the benefit of the doubt in an ambiguous situation. Google is one of the best examples of the Right Thing winning by superior quality. Google is constantly changing what they do, but I hope they never change the way they do them!

Correction to your claim

[0x0d0a]

Google hit the point where they decided that not losing money would be wise, and they've started to fill up on advertisements. For all we know Google might be 2MB of Flashvertisements in a years time.

Google is profitable. They also have a roughly even division between profit from their consumer-level ads market, and their indexing/searching services sold to businesses, which gives them the ability to jump into either market if one goes south.

Also, Google is hardly "filling up on advertisements".

Re:Correction to your claim

[ergo98]

I didn't say they weren't profitable: Indeed, we were talking historically. Historically Google had zero (nada) ads, however they then decided to capitalize and we got adwords and it's predecessor. I don't fault them for that at all, though many hyper defensive Google defenders see it as a big insult.

Regarding the loading up comment: While I can't seem to duplicate it, some searches would get me 8 or more adword ad boxes running down the right of the screen. Whether adwords has been a failure or they imposed some limits, now I can't get more than two. They might not not be big graphics, but they still are ads.

Second to Google

[dirvish]

I believe Alta Vista is currently the second best search engine. Obviously these recent changes to the search engine are a step in the right direction.

Altavista's lame syntax

[0x0d0a]

It's because of Altavista's lame syntax. Back in the day, Altavista used to bill their huge index (which now is dwarfed by Google's). They'd spit back this useless, gigantic number showing you how many possible hits you got. Back then, this was a measure of quality.

One huge way they increased mindshare was by making all searches "OR" by default. So if you search for "macintosh computer", you find all pages containing either word. You need "+macintosh +computer" if you want to do an AND search. Yup -- every word (well, or phrase) must be prefixed by a plus. Since Google's more honest and has removed us from these idiocies, I say good riddance.

Re:Altavista's lame syntax

[Reziac]

Guess what, I tried +wordone +wordtwo, and AV still didn't produce the expected result! OTOH, it did spit back one result that was effectively "word-one" (note inserted hyphen).

But I agree, "OR by default" is just lame, and counterproductive for everyday users who won't know such tricks as +wordone +word2. *Especially* lame as a default in the "advanced" search!!

Google does have pretty sensible defaults that simplify what you need to type in to get out what you need. Not to mention having their forms rigged so ENTER does the logical thing once you type your parameters.

Re:Altavista's lame syntax

[PurpleBob]

It's wonderful how times have changed.

I remember when Google was first getting attention, and people were miffed that they couldn't use their "+wordone +wordtwo" syntax that AltaVista had hammered into them.

Re:Altavista's lame syntax

[Reziac]

LOL! Am afraid I missed developing that nasty habit, since way back when, I didn't like Altavista anyway, and soon ran off to Hotbot. :)

Re:AltaVista vs. Google: speed and relevance shoot

[nstrom]

Also, a google search for "putty" goes to the SSH client of that name. I think Google might put an emphasis on tech pages somehow, or it's just the fact that techies are more likely to write web pages.

Re:AltaVista vs. Google: speed and relevance shoot

[nbvb]

Nah, I'm not a stoner. (Reason #1 I don't fit in the Slashdot crowd.)

I'm also not into 16-year-olds (Reason #2 I don't fit in the Slashdot crowd.)

Hell, I've got the most wonderful girlfriend (soon to be fiancee) already (Reason #3 I don't fit in the Slashdot crowd.)

And, I've been a Mac OS X convert (From Solaris) since Day One (Reason #4 I don't fit in the Slashdot crowd.)

Nah, doesn't make me want to "switch" ... I'd rather just stay on OSX :)

--NBVB

Was?

[Anonymous Coward]

Was?

Re:AltaVista vs. Google: speed and relevance shoot

[PurpleBob]

It's simple. People link to the PuTTY page because it's so damn useful. People don't link to the Silly Putty home page (the next result) because, well, it isn't.

Re:AltaVista vs. Google: speed and relevance shoot

[Anonymous Coward]

Even more curiously, it's nothing but a blank page, even Google's chached version. How did a blank page rank to highly?

Future of trolling.

[Anonymous Coward]

It's coming!!!
You are not ready.
You can't stop it.
TROLLING BEGINS:
January 1st, 2003.
It's coming.

~ The New True Troll High Council

It looks like...

[Tokerat]

...one of those annoying "HOST YOUR PAGE" pop-ups with all the "Click your intrest!!!" links, which some web-hosting companies use when you get a 404. The focus of the page isn't on the "Search" aspect, it's a "Browse our portal" type thing. This is exactly why Google is the best. It's the only "Search" left on the Internet. Everything else got hyped up into being a Web Portal, but Google just wants to find you stuff.

Of course, I always used WebCrawler *shrug* so I dont' really remember the "old" Altavista when it was popular...

Re:AltaVista vs. Google: speed and relevance shoot

[theNeophile]

Do I know what rhetorical means???

Actually, we did.

[registro]

> What, AltaVista ranked your site higher than Google?

No, actually our main company is on top on both on then, just like we are in most search engines I could care about, since 1995. We just happen to be following a number of keywords to track how Google is behaving. As a hosting company, we have a interest on traffic fluctuations, and Google is a key factor there. Any how, if you chose not to believe me, you may want to know what other critics are saying: just check out this news.com article about the Google Gods, or this Wired aricle about Google degraded cuality

>See, Google is a really unique entity. Most
>successful companies are driven by business
>types, suits. Google is a big collection of
>computer scientists doing research, and taking a
>no-compromises approach to product quality...

Ok, that is enough. You have a very idealistic view of Google, the marketing brand, and you are failing to see how Google, the real world company, is actually behaving. I think that you need a realty check, my friend.

Do you love Google? Good, many people do. It is a nice company, a very nice company. But it IS a company. It has been financed by venture capitals, it has professional managers, and it is expecting a return.

Google is not a community driven effort, no since they left Stanford. Everything else is just propaganda: They sold out, just like the rest. They ARE a profit driven company. Is that bad? Well, not at all, or, unless, no necessarily.

But, problem is, they hold 90% of the no-MSN queries, and that is not healthy at all for the rest of the market. Power may corrupt anybody, and excessive power certainly does corrupt any company. That is why America and the EU both have antimonopoly laws.

Altavista is toast

[Tottori]

Compare Altavista search: Wil Wheaton with Google search: Wil Wheaton.

Looks like Altavista have redesigned their home page, but their search is still the same old rubbish.

Altavista

[cwbys]

They seem to compete with Google in the B2B area as well. Ixquick.com is now using Altavista in their metasearch. Worthwile testing. Although they are just using the first ten results, Altavista appears quite often in the top 10 at Ixquick.com. Maybe that's because the Altavista results seems to be quite relevant?

Test with 'xine'

[tholti]

Just entered xine into altavista and google. Altavista's first results page does not contain the link to the project page *at all*, Google's first result is the right link. Of course, this is not a scientific test, but it's relevant to me ...

Re: Baloney

[dragoncortez]

Google spends 3 or 4 days every month reorganizing their rankings. These changes reflect the fact that many sites change and new sites are added, in addition to alterations Google makes to their algorithm. Try reading here before you blame Google for your loss of traffic.

Re:AltaVista vs. Google: speed and relevance shoot

[Anonymous Coward]

Did Apple pay Google to have MacOS placed above any links for Jaguar cars, or is this a result of thousands of Mac users linking to Apple's MacOS X site?

My guess is some of option two, plus tech news sites linking to it, plus lots of people searching for "Jaguar" recently and choosing that link.

Re:Sheesh

[new dollar building]

What the fuck does google have? Googlefights??

First rule of Googlefight Club is... you do NOT talk about Googlefight Club.

Hey, it seemed funny when I first thought of it.

Best, hell

[KnightStalker]

I remember when they were the only search engine you didn't have to submit your site to, and this "spider" technology they developed was revolutionary. They had it on their school's web site, somewhere under www.cs.washington.edu.

Search for the other

[Anonymous Coward]

Anyone ever put "google" into Altavista ot "altavista" into Google least they don't block each other.

been a while

[lposeidon]

damn i feel old. altavista used to be good. but that was eons ago. hey atleast there is still 'babelfish'... soft of. for now, and hopefully a while Google is the best.

Re: Baloney

[registro]

That is funny, I originally posted this at WW. I regularilly read Webmsterworld, thank you. I even write some times there, when local censors let me do it. Are you talking about the everflux effect? There is no relation at all. Everflux is about a tinny percentage of the databases, as new and old real time databases gets in and out. No a 10.000.000 to 140.000 thing.

Last Post!

[alpg]

SOMETIMES THE BEAUTY OF THE WORLD is so overwhelming, I just want to throw
back my head and gargle. Just gargle and gargle and I don't care who hears
me because I am beautiful.
-- Jack Handley, The New Mexican, 1988.

- this post brought to you by the Automated Last Post Generator...