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.

Comments

Wow, way to fuck that up

[Jack9]

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.

Re:Wow, way to fuck that up

[Anonymous Coward]

Google was a double-edged sword. It did give more relevant search results, compared to the competitors of the time (Yahoo, Lycos, hell, archie even.) For example, if I wanted to look up "part" as a keyword, most search engines would return stuff like "compartment", "apartment", or pages with that word returned. It would take building SQL queries "this AND this OR this NOT (this or this)" in order to find usable results. With Google and its ability to use links, it had a far better tendency to find stuff.

However, Google brought the whole industry of SEO with it, where you have a small article on the page, with sidebars full of keywords and links. Just visit a clickbait site like Diply or Buzzfeed, or other wordpress sites to see this crapola. Of course, the SEO guys drive nicer cars than most of what we have, but in reality, SEO is an industry that should be worthless.

Grammar?

[marovada]

I found the summary of this article very confusing. Phrases such as "At the other hand" and "indexing altogether"?? Oh, and call me ignorant for not understanding what "IR" means. Infrared? Then I read the article and found that the summary is just a badly strung together quotation of the text, including all of the grammatical errors. I'm still confused, but slightly less so.

The interface had something to do with it

[EdwinV]

By the time Altavista got popular, the interface was a cluttered mess where you could hardly find the search line. Google came with an almost empty screen with a logo and a search line. You'd have switched just to save your eyes. More like the good old Webcrawler interface.

Re:How the hell did this get on the front page?

[Lumpy]

Editors? you must be new here.

Re:Was Altavista...

[towermac]

Yes, Altavista was better than Yahoo. I remember reading that Yahoo was a static directory, updated by humans; whereas AV had a newfangled web crawler. Anyone remember the term 'spider'? Altavista wasn't known all that well though, and it was part of my geek cred to show it to users. And usually, it found what they were looking for.

Pretty much the moment Google came on the scene though, it was better than Altavista. AVs answer? Plaster the front page with ads and 'content'. Make it a 'portal' to the web.

Heh. Wrong answer.

Re:And today?

[phantomfive]

Today search is ALMOST ENTIRELY SHIT. It is used because shit is king.

If you think that, you don't remember Alta Vista, which had millions of links to "Page not Found" and in the search results had multiple listings to the same (often broken) page.