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

Plagiarize much?

[Doogie Howser]

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...

Re:Wow, way to fuck that up

[fermion]

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.