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Yahoo Puts AltaVista To Death
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.
I won't believe it until Netcraft confirms it
You'll never make me use Google!
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
If you can only take so many years of being a running gag then can we look forward to Yahoo! pulling the plug on itself?
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"Running gag" is a shame, they really were pioneers in the search engine business. For me the switch to Google was simply because it had (and still has) an uncluttered interface.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
Yeah, but it's not what it used to be.
Back in the day, it was the best search engine out there. Used it dozens of times every day. Granted, that was back when "www.hp.com" was an invalid URL and you had to use "www.hp.boise.com" to get a printer driver, but still....
Can't necessarily say I''m "sad" to see them go, but it does raise a little pang of nostalgia.....
link works fine, you are just infected with the McAfee Virus
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).
Now, wasn't it astavista that provided me with so much reasonably priced software?
No, it was www.astalavista.box.sk
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.
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?"
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).
Heh... Yeah...
Back when I was still using altavista, I heard something about a search engine called "google" here on slashdot. People seemed to like it, but I couldn't figure out why. Lots of people raved about how cool their "simple" page was, but I didn't think that was a big deal. Tried google once in the beginning, wasn't impressed with the search results, and kept going with altavista.
Was probably a little over a year later I was looking for something, altavista wasn't finding it, so out of desperation I figured I'd give this "google" thing a try. The exact thing I was looking for was the first result. Never used altavista again.
By the way. I never did buy into that whole "Don't be evil" crap. I wasn't born yesterday.
Ah, the original babelfish link, http://babelfish.altavista.com./ I used it long after I started using Google for searches. Agreed, the translations were head and shoulders above everybody else.
Understanding the scope of the problem is the first step on the path to true panic.
I stopped using Altavista when they nuked the "NEAR" keyword.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
"Warez do you want to go today?"
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*.
baby.
by TheSpoom (715771) Uncaring Linux user here. I have nothing to add to this but please continue. *munches popcorn*
What really got me in to Google was how light their search page was. It had one, small graphic, and the rest was just a precise bit of HTML. In those days, the best I could do was a 26.4Kbps dial-up connection, which made Google an outstanding choice over Yahoo! and Dogpile, which had been frustrating me with all the crap that was necessary to load before the page was useful. It really made a huge difference, and I'm thinking that's more significantly responsible for their initial success than even the quality of their search results.
Learning about brewing beer, by brewing beer.
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.
AltaVista was a huge innovation. Nobody at the time thought that someone could provide a search service for the entire internet for free. DEC rented the old vacant telephone building behind the Walgreens in downtown Palo Alto. (That building now houses the Palo Alto Internet Exchange, which at one time was the major Silicon Valley switching node for the Internet.) They installed DEC Alpha rack-mounted machines. The whole thing was a demo of DEC Alpha technology, to show that a large number of DEC machines could do things no mainframe could.
That was a huge change from previous data center construction. Until then, most data centers had raised floors and nice cabinets. Telephone central offices, though, had tall open racks firmly bolted to the building, with cable trays overhead. AltaVista was the first big data center built that way. Telcos were better at cable management than computer services in those days. Using telco-style cable management turned out to be a huge win.
Do you remember DEC? If they could see the potential in search engine market, they would end up buying Compaq and HP, with the head start they have. For the sake of fairness, I do not think nobody could see search services as a major product before Google showed us.
I've heard Larry Page eats babies and drinks the blood of castrated goats. It must be true because Google lies so much.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Actually, that is true. I found it through one of the expert guides at The Mining Company.