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

It had to do with location/SV politics

[Anonymous Coward]

Altavista was Boston based. Infoseek was Seattle based. Yahoo and Google were silicon valley/Stanford based where all the incestuous famous money networking and bribe-able journalists are. Google search sucked for porn and wares, though they tried hard to be the best at it pre-IPO. Their second page of results was always garbage (ie. they query system was broken) till long after their IPO.

After DEC was destroyed by Intel/Compaq's anticompetitive offer they couldn't refuse to kill Alpha, Altavista got axed and sold off through a couple of exchanges to Yahoo (while wetting the right people's beaks) to kill it off as well. These were all moves by the same cabal of Sand Hill scum to remove competition in their investments.

Re:inertia? AltaVista was big before Google existe

[wisnoskij]

They had a complimentary idea, not a different idea. Page Rank ranks a page in general terms, but tells you nothing on if it has anything to do with Einstein (from what I understand). You still need some form of the old way of judging the Einsteininess of a page.

Alta Vista was not supposed to make money

[aberglas]

It was a technology demonstration of DEC's (remember Digital Equipment? If so you are old!) new Alpha chips and servers, so powerful that they could index the entire early 1990s web. A very minor side project.

When Compaq bought DEC, they were surprised to find that they had also bought Alta Vista. Around then somebody tried to commercialize it and killed it in the process.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Retconning - wasn't about search quality at first

[mccalli]

It was about speed of loading. Google had a blank white page with a search box. Altavista had gone the horrible "portlet"-style approach of gluing loads of things together. Google's page loaded quickly, Altavista's did not.

When I, and those I was working with, first switched to Google the actual search results were different to what you'd "expect" (Altavista's results were the gold standard, any deviation was looked on suspciously) but they were about the same in quality. Later they became better, but it wasn't the driver at first - was all about the clean page.

Re:Wow, way to fuck that up

[Dynamoo]

I remember when AltaVista first came out.. it was a revelation. The result you wanted was normally on the first few pages. Don't laugh - that was a big frigging deal at the time. These days, if the result you want isn't number one then you assume something is borked.

But it was quite easy to game the system. To begin with, if you wanted to be #1 for "SEX" you would just repeat the word "SEX" a lot of times. It was all done on in-page factors. Of course, AltaVista engineers eventually tried to counteract the spam (use a word too many times and it counts against you, for example), but the whole PageRank idea did lead to better results.

I seem to remember that AltaVista was originally a project to show how powerful DEC's Alpha processors were. Instead, it opened up the idea that the whole web (or at least millions of pages) could be searchable on a full-text basis. That was pretty revolutionary at the time.