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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.
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.
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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...
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.
I got no such thing from the quora page (https://www.quora.com/Why-did-Altavista-search-engine-lose-ground-so-quickly-to-Google/answer/Marcia-J-Bates)
It doesn't even have a second page!
The link from TFS is to http://www.pc-tablet.co.in/, which is just as long as the original quora page, but it's reworded to the point of being useless.
For example, where the bastardized pc-tablet page says, "Google successfully recognized the potential of URLs", the original didn't use the word URL in the entire article. What they said was, "What the Google founders recognized about search on the Web was that information about LINKS could be added to the algorithms." See, that makes much more sense, and it's actually what google did! Link to your page from other pages significantly increased your page rank, even more so if those other pages were on topic. The URL of those other pages didn't matter, and they weren't extracting any additional information from the URL.
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.
Editors? you must be new here.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
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.
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/...