Slashdot Mirror
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
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.
Often wrong but never in doubt.
I am Jack9.
Everyone knows me.
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.
Providing links to search results was obviously far more useful to web users than Infrared.
Duh.
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...
Firehose moderation picked this article? Editors allowed it in? or did Dice just take a big payoff?
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
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.
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.
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.
...a coworker pointed out that this new search engine "Google" was much better for finding academic papers. At that time, Google was excellent for academic papers, but useless for most other things.
My how times have changed. Not that I can obtain academic papers without paying through the ... nose ... anyway.
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
not google that cause AltaVista to fail.
by TheSpoom (715771) Uncaring Linux user here. I have nothing to add to this but please continue. *munches popcorn*
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.
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.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
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.
Around '92/93 I was an Alta Vista user. They they decided that if you shovel money their way they would put your search results to the top of the list. I, and evidently a couple others, said "fark that" and went looking for alternatives. Google was the alternative that gave the best search results.
Fark Alta Vista, I'm glad you're dead and buried.
From my recollection it was because it did away the mess of the portal concept, did away with intrusive ads and focused on search. It was simple and effective. Everything else was a marketer's wet dream, but a mess for anyone else.
I am sure people who used the net back then can confirm that it was the simplicity and elegance of Google that gave it the advantage. I certainly switched because of that.
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
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.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
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/...
The whole bit about Google using links as an integral part of PageRank (and this being different from AltaVista, et al) has been public information since around the day Google went live. Google, for all their secretiveness, has never been shy about that bit. (And, of course, it led to the creation of the SEO industry, since AltaVista-baiting by simply stuffing keywords colored white past the article over and over stopped working.)
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.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
This is not true. I've worked in the Search Engine space since 1995, and at all times Google's result were superior to Altavista. Not only was the Google ranking algorithm superior, the Altavista crawl fell way behind the Google crawl, so often the page you were looking for wasn't even in the Altavista index.