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Why AltaVista Lost Ground To Google Sooner Than Expected
techtsp writes: Marcia J. Bates, UCLA Professor Emerita of Information Studies recently explained why Google's birth led to the downfall of AltaVista. According to Bates, early search engines including AltaVista adapted the classical IR methods. At the other hand, Google founders started off with a completely different approach in mind. Google successfully recognized the potential of URLs, which could be added to the algorithms for the sake of information indexing altogether. Google's modern age techniques were a huge boost to those older techniques. Whatever other business and company management issues AltaVista faced, it was the last of the old style information retrieval engines.
https://www.quora.com/Why-did-Altavista-search-engine-lose-ground-so-quickly-to-Google/answer/Marcia-J-Bates
First paragraph at Wikipedia: "AltaVista was an early web search engine founded in 1995. It was once one of the most popular search engines, but it lost ground to Google and was purchased by Yahoo! in 2003, which retained the brand but based all AltaVista searches on its own search engine. On July 8, 2013, the service was shut down by Yahoo! and since then, the domain redirects to Yahoo!'s own search site.[2]"
Second and third lines of TFA: "Founded in 1995, AltaVista was a very popular Internet search engine website. Nevertheless, AltaVista lost ground to Google and was purchased by Yahoo! in 2003. Ten years later, Yahoo! officially shut down AltaVista in July 2013 and redirected the domain name to its own search engine website."
Hmm...
I don't specifically recall using Alta Vista, but I do remember how terrible all of the search engines were before Google came along. They didn't return the most relevant results, they returned the web sites that paid them to be placed higher; Google was the first one to actually do what the user wanted from a search engine - return relevant results.
The article says "URLs" when the Quora post, cited as the source, says LINKS. Also the article is basically devoid of any information, other than "Google did better because it used LINKS to help determine ranking." Thanks for the headline, with a summary, linking to an article that misquotes the linked source, that has a healine worth of information. No really, thanks.
It's a paid-for "article" to a ad-infested link-farm.
Here's a link to the ACTUAL story: https://www.quora.com/Why-did-...
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
Altavista had better results than Google for years, especially because you could use all sorts of search modifiers that Google didn't support till later like -no_pages_with_this_word or +must +have +all +these and logical operators.
But then as the leaders they got cocky and wanted to be a portal and filled up the page with so much crap and spam it hurt. Meanwhile Google's page was still just search box, go, I'm feeling lucky, and a few other tiny things.
That's why I switched after Google got good enough that they were comparable, NOT better. It was just less annoying. That's why most of the people I knew back then switched.
AltaVista realized too late what they'd done and tried to rebrand as 'Raging' with just a simple search page, but by then it was too late.
I'm sure the Google approach is much more scaleable but the article seems terribly confused and like it's trying to make some bizarre sense out of a cultural artifact from a time they can't comprehend.
There's a thing called the science citation index that sorts papers that are referenced more to a higher score than those that are not referenced much, and it's a good way to find those papers on a topic that others have found most useful.
Google saw it worked and applied a similar method using links (as the above poster wrote). That method brought human judgment that had already been applied into the mix and enabled them to index far more rapidly than AltaVista with better results than AltaVista's simple keyword searches. It was more likely to lead people to a key site that many used instead of an abandoned fan site.
That's the main difference.
Inertia? AltaVista, Hotbot, and Excite had the inertia. They were the big players when a couple of college students thought up the idea that became Google. AltaVista and the other established players had the inertia.
The established search engines also had algorithms based on word frequency in various parts of the page. I did search engine optimisation back then, so I studied it in detail. The simplified explanation is that searching for "Einstein" would return whichever page had the word Einstein repeated the most on the page. Minus points for repeating it "too many" times.
Google had a revolutionary idea. If lots of good pages link to abouteinstein.com, It's probably a good page. That's Page Rank, and it worked quite well. That's the far and above the most important reason Google won - their ranking system was far superior because it was based on a different, better, idea.
* You might wonder how Google knows which pages are "good", in order to calculate which pages are linked to by good pages, and are therefore also good. It's recursive across the whole internet. If lots of pages link to princeton.edu/physics/, and princeton.edu/physics/ links to lab.gov/particles/, then lab.gov/particles/ gains some "good" points. Specifically, it gains an equal share of the Princeton's pages rank value as all other links on Princeton's page. In other words, whatever value a page has, that value is divided equally among each page it links to. So a page "vouches" for each page it links to, but if it links to many pages, it can also pass a small amount of credibility to each.
Altavista used keywords and the assumption that websites would be honest, because, what motivation would they have to not be honest. There was no real monitization on the web, and websites with bad reputations, websites that included keywords that were bogus, would simply fall off the web due to free market forces. However, about a year after Altavista was founded, 2o7 among other c tracking cookies began to monetize visits to web pages. Altavista, though a huge innovation over Yahoo, was still a simplistic model that really had no method to counteract the market forces that made keyword inflation profitable. Also, Altavista had no real way make money. Google was a hybrid of Altavista and 2o7 and had several advantages. First, because it used links and not keywords, it could actually use free market forces to evaluate the quality of the page. The assumption was that if a page were linked by a lot of other sites, then the page was useful and it could be ranked based on content. The second was that unlike 2o7, google actually provided a service to end users, so end users were in effect compensated for allowing tracking cookies on their computer. I myself had my browser set to reject all tracking cookies except for Google as I needed those cookies for other services. Third, the Google algorithm was quite sophisticated, so could be tweaked as the pure link based ranking failed due to link farms and the like. Now, honestly, in many cases the search results returned by google are no better than the search results returned by altavista at the turn of the century. What saves google is that it has funds and motivation to improve the results as the SEO people attempt to manipulate the rankings. I think google is looking at the secondary and tertiary levels of the links to determine ranking, which is helping a lot. Ultimately there is going to have to be some serious math done and graph theory developed to get the ranking back to the quality that allowed Google to pummel everyone else.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
The 'fast' thing really can't be overstated. By the time Google launched, AltaVista's search page had become huge, to the extent that it took about 30 seconds to load on a 28.8Kb/s MODEM (the fastest that mine could connect at given the line quality, though on paper it could do 56Kb/s). Google took well under 5 seconds (not because Google devs were clever and actively aimed for this, quite the reverse: they didn't initially have anyone good at HTML/CSS stuff, so produced the simplest page that worked).
I remember the search results on Google being worse than AltaVista, but getting them so much faster that I could start loading the first 3-4 before AltaVista showed me anything. Occasionally I'd go back to AltaVista if Google failed. A few years later, Google fucked up their UI enough to make me switch to DuckDuckGo.
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