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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?
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.
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.
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
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.
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*
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.
d =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;"> </td>
<td class=csr onclick="BlOp('/r?ck_sm=5282c169&ref=200020080&ui
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.
Here bookmark this one in your favorites!
http://www.altavista.com/web/text
Beat that Google (-:
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.
they also bought av.com later on.
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.
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.
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.
Sigs are bad for your health.
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.
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?
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!
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.
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.
Looks like Altavista have redesigned their home page, but their search is still the same old rubbish.
use constant PERL_IS_BROKEN => $] >= 5.006;
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 ...