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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?
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 (-:
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?
Looks like Altavista have redesigned their home page, but their search is still the same old rubbish.
use constant PERL_IS_BROKEN => $] >= 5.006;