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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?
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.
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....
Moderation: +4. Modded 70% Funny and 30% Overrated. 100% Saturated.
altavista.digital.com
"Anyone remember when Alta Vista was the best search engine?"
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
72 CD D7 52 D0 7E D8 47 44 91 D5 84 D1 59 F1 A9-This is my 128bit integer. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
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.
> 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.
- 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?
And remember kids: Never trust a computer you can actually lift.
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
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.
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.
c /D ocs/old-whats-new/whats-new-0693.html
http://archive.ncsa.uiuc.edu/SDG/Software/Mosai
Of course search engines were still important, but everyone just used archie for searching FTP sites, or maybe Veronica for searching Gopher sites.
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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.
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.
-Through the server, over the router, off the firewall... Nothing but 'Net!
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.
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
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.
is if we had a search engine that used a moderation system for the website matches.
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.)
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
...-.-
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.