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Altavista Renewed

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the old-dogs-never-die dept.

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?

4 of 331 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Altavista the best? by ergo98 · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

  2. Sneaky Links by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    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>

    1. Re:Sneaky Links by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

      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.

    2. Re:Sneaky Links by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

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