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Yahoo Puts AltaVista To Death

Posted by timothy on from the pour-your-electronic-version-of-a-40 dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Remember AltaVista from the late '90s? Yahoo is finally pulling life support and letting Altavista die a noble death after over 15 years of hard service." You can only take so many years of being a running gag.

9 of 176 comments (clear)

  1. Re:AltaVista by Creepy · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Yeah - loved it in the early days, but Google just nuked it as far as speed of search results and page load time went, and then it went the way of the dodo. One of the things they did far better than Google for a long time was translate. Google's first few passes at it produced some pretty horrible translations and lacked much of an idiom database, something they've vastly improved since (milchgesicht comes out 'baby face' now, not 'milk face' when translated from German, for instance, and Altavista's babelfish was one of the few that got it correct for a long time).

  2. Ah the memories by Coppit · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I remember back in the day AltaVista was the only search engine which allowed you to use + and - to fine-tune the results. Before Google's pagerank that was the best you could hope for.

  3. Re:AltaVista by interkin3tic · · Score: 3, Interesting

    It still seems so recent that I overheard someone say they were going to "have to search for that on google" and thinking "What, is that like altavista?"

  4. I totally remember altavista by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Interesting

    It was the only search engine that allowed very specific +/- combos. I remember it being better in that respect than Google is now (although Google was vastly better returning correct results when it came on the scene).

  5. From the for what it's worth department... by tlambert · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I remember back in the day AltaVista was the only search engine which allowed you to use + and - to fine-tune the results. Before Google's pagerank that was the best you could hope for.

    From the for what it's worth department... when Google dropped the ability to force inclusion of specific search terms, which was shortly before it introduced Google+, it was incredibly contentious inside Google itself, and a lot of Google employees at the time, myself included, complained bitterly about the ability to get accurate results any more.

    Most of use were natural lexicographers who could think hierarchically enough that we knew the search terms we wanted in order to get the results we wanted. surprising how we ended up working at a search engine, right? About 2/3rds of us really felt they were "dumbing down" search in order to use the same datastores for normal search as the first and second order relationships being used to generate targetted advertising results. Altavista was mentioned *a lot*.

    1. Re:From the for what it's worth department... by psychonaut · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Google never dropped the ability to force inclusion of specific search terms; they just changed the syntax without telling anyone. Before you had to prepend a + to any term you wanted to include in the results. Now you instead need to surround the term with quotation marks.

    2. Re:From the for what it's worth department... by tlambert · · Score: 4, Interesting

      If I want to search for exact words in any order, "A" "B" "C" is NOT the same as +A +B +C was, since it doesn't force inclusion. Instead I get ""best" and "useful" results, rather than results based on my judgement.

      This is great for most people, who don't know how search engines work, don't care, or are just looking for sponsored results or porn, but it's not that useful to, for example, get results containing technical reports and papers in a particular field (for example). For CS, there's citeseer searching, but for biology and other fields, it's a real pain.

  6. Re:AltaVista by GerryHattrick · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Astonishing that they killed a respected (if unserviced) Brand like 'Altavista', and went on using a stupid (if Swiftean) word like 'Yahoo'. So it's not just Microsoft and HP that can get global marketing completely wrong.

  7. Re:Obligatory by hairyfeet · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Sir I used VMS, knew VMS, VMS was a friend of mine, Windows is no VMS.

    Cutler used some of the same IDEAS he used in VMS, same as Torvalds rightly or wrongly, depending on your opinion of the results, used ideas from minix and Unix, but the results are NOT the same. Most of the ideas like portability which Cutler incorporated into early NT in fact were removed for speed, which is now why MSFT can't get away from X86, if they would have actually kept Cutler's ideas it would have been trivial to port, but they went the speed route and it bit them in the ass.

    For an example of how badly "Wintel" infected that company look at how Cyrix and Winchip ran great on OS/2 and BeOS but barely passable on Windows, or hell how the Bulldozer arch by AMD gets a lot more performance under linux than Windows.

    --
    ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.