Slashdot Mirror
Altavista Redesign is more 'Portal-Like'
GeHa & others called our attention to the new AltaVista main page that went live late Saturday night (EDT). Apparently the formal kickoff for the redesign is scheduled for Monday and will include a live Lauryn Hill Webcast. I wonder what entertainer Google would choose to help publicize a major site change. Any ideas? UPDATE by RM Sunday morning: the new page is aparently on again, off again until the formal Monday launch. IMO it's not as useful as the old one even though AV is making much noise about it.
You can read more about it here.
Quote: PageRank capitalizes on the uniquely democratic characteristic of the web by using its vast link structure as an organizational tool. In essence, Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B. Google assesses a page's importance by the votes it receives. But Google looks at more than sheer volume of votes, or links; it also analyzes the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves "important" weigh more heavily and help to make other pages "important."
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You ought to try it, then you'd know. I could say it's the best search engine, but you won't understand that until you've experienced it.
Come on in, the links are great!
While I definitely agree that the loss of focus is ultimately a bad thing for consumers (Deja is utterly unuseable through their interface, and even through dejasearch, is still not what it used to be), I think Yahoo has actually done it fairly well. Their main page and main focus and main functionality aren't terribly different than they were 3 years ago. If I'm looking for a good index page on something fairly common, I go there first and it's extremely useful. (They have an entire category for traceroute servers, including links to several indices which would have taken me quite a while to find with a traditional 'search'). If it makes me pedestrian to find indices of useful things (insurance, airline tickets, weather, stocks) in one place *without it being obnoxious* oh well. I guess I get a lot more annoyed when it takes away from or eliminates the original service.
As a side note, I think the utility of the pure search engine is decreasing by the day - regardless of what cruft their front page is filled with, their results are filled with even more. I usually search 2-3 search engines before finding one that seems to give what I'm looking for, and my order of operations is still altavista, yahoo, lycos, google.
I have not been able to do an advanced search of USENET on the new AltaVista. There also seems to be no text-only option for Usenet.
Talking in HTML, The input tag for Usenet search
<input type=radio name=stype value=utext>
will not work together with advanced search:
<INPUT TYPE=hidden NAME=pg VALUE=q>
or text-only:
<INPUT TYPE=hidden NAME=text VALUE=yes>
This breaks code I have written in Python to download job ads of interest to me.
No, it does NOT.
...
No more usenet-wide searches, which was the most useful feature of AltaVista, or of any search site, hands down.
DejaNews doesn't cut it for usenet searches because they just don't seem to index everything
Back to 1994...
It's from compaq.
Search Partners
Research "Slashdot" at AtHand.
Find books on "Slashdot" at bn.com.
Research "Slashdot" at DealerNet.
[sigh]
http://chinook.altavista.com/
What is up with all these big players losing their focus? Yahoo wants to have a branded version of everything you can do on the Net. Deja News wasn't happy being a world-class Usenet index, so they've revamped themselves into a sucky consumer portal. Now AltaVista has decided that the thing to do is to is to forget what they used to do well and instead do 12 other things poorly.
On the face of it, this is irrational. The value of the Net was supposed to be precisely that it would allow people to focus on doing one thing well, and then the rest of the world would link to them rather than reinventing the wheel. Why does the world need Yahoo! Auctions, for example, when eBay exists and has a near-perfect implementation of Internet auctioning? Wouldn't the logical thing be for Yahoo to just link to eBay and focus on improving their index?
The thing is -- that would be the logical thing, but we're not living in logical times. All this "portal" BS is a function of the Internet stock bubble. Yahoo IS focused -- on keeping their stock price high, not on the quality of their index. This means that they must jump on every bandwagon that comes along in order to keep all those nervous day traders out there from hitting "SELL" on their Yahoo stock. Same deal for Deja (which is in the process of going public) and AltaVista (owned by CMGI, a public company), as well as Amazon and many others too numerous to mention.
The point is, someday this Net stock bubble is going to burst, and then we'll probably see logic take hold of the Net market and Yahoo! will focus on its directory, Deja on Usenet, AltaVista on searching, etc. -- assuming they survive the downturn -- but as long as crazy investors are willing to throw money at any company that's more focused on being buzzword-compliant than focused on their core business, this weird diversification will persist.
Read my blog.
It's Pikachu not pica-chu
Why? The Google Dolls, obviously.
I use two search engines. Google and the text-only Altavista boolean search. As long as I can link directly to these two pages, I don't care what happens to the front end.
Maybe the BSD section could talk about Yahoo, considering it runs FreeBSD.
Regarding annoying portal features, such as banner ads, I've set up my own local proxy server just to block the major ad clearinghouse sites and save loading time. It's also annoying the way many search engines defaulti to, if not mandate, only 10 results per page just to force more page/ad views. That alone is a major reason for the "This engine is useless, I can't find anything syndrome". John Reece reece@cruzio.com
So what did they do? The portal was born. All the content of the old services, plus they don't have to provide you with dial-up access to see it! You just come on your own, look at their ads, provide them with demographic information... pretty sweet deal. For them.
The beauty of the Internet is the unconnectedness of these things. Down with portals, and down with AltaVista for joining this insane movement!
errrr... The altavista webpage seems to be the same as it has been since a few weeks ago. Perhaps this is due to the fact that I'm living on the West Coast.
I've never understood the appeal of portals. Do you seriously just go to a webpage, and use links off of it, rather than your own bookmarks?
I make heavy use of the "Links" or "Personal Toolbar" buttons instead of using a portal site. Don't most people do this?
Jordan
Something that I've been accustomed to doing is making my own "start" page, with my most used links, quick sumbit forms to the search engines I need, a clock, and other stuff like grabbing headlines from /.!. Having it load up locally, is a lot faster than visiting a portal site (which are often fairly lengthly) every time you start Netscape, no banner ads, no marketing schemes, no annoying windows that pop up everywhere...
Portals are annoying, I can't even comprehend how any of them actually make money except for Yahoo.
"the voices in my head say crazy things"
How did they manage to make it as ugly !?
http://www.altavista.com/cgi-bin/query?opt=on&e
Above is the Link I use, this removes almost everything except the search function.
there are various settings you can set if you hunt for them.
> I wonder what entertainer Google would choose
> to help publicize a major site change. Any
> ideas?
Weird Al?
#include "ihateportalstoo.h"
-- www.bteg.com | bleh.n3.net | hac47.dhs.org
For one thing, when you mean portal-like, do you mean Yahoo!-like? It doesn't look exactly like Yahoo! just yet but it's getting to be as obnoxious. The only thing I use Altavista for is for the search engine and the translation services, which Altavista is known for. The other stuff is fluff and makes Altavista currently look totally disorganized. At least Yahoo! can organize the fluff. Ever since Compaq bought Digital, things have gone downhill in my opinion. It's not just Altavista, but also with the entire structure of Digital itself. The idea of of having to use "Compaq Tru64 UNIX" as opposed to Digital UNIX is a sickening thought, but I digress. *sigh*
"...today consumers have been conditioned to think of beer when they see a bullfrog..."
Google uses a new type of algorithm to rank the relevancy of pages based on how many other pages link to it. It's not just the fact that it runs under Linux - it's the result of a some pretty sophisticated new ideas on how to best search the web.
Check this out for more information in what is going on with search engines.
With all due respect, try searching for "to be or not to be" on google. It doesn't allow searching for sentences and it doesn't allow all those +s and -s which are so useful on altavista.
When searching for something which is so common you will find hundreds of results and you want the most relevant one - you can't beat google. But for those hard-to-find tidbits altavista is still the best.
----
Stop worrying about the risks of nuclear power and start worrying about the risks of not using nuclear power.
So, I wouldn't blame The Man for this, blame the people too lazy to explore what's out there. There were pioneers on the 'net, blazing new trails, as it were... Now, the homesteaders are coming in, building towns and stripmalls.
I've been using AltaVista almost exclusively, because of the text-based boolean searching features, for some time. This feature is, IMO, its greatest strength. This is the second redesign from AV I've seen, and each revision seems to become slightly less visually appealing and incorporates slightly more irrelevant cruft. The newest version is unslightly enough that I can hardly stand to look at it.
Here's the question: it seems like many of us choose a particular search engine because of a set of features that it implements particularly well-- Yahoo for drill-down searching, AV for boolean queries and more results, etc. However, most portals look just about the same to me, and as a result search sites are looking increasingly homogeneous. Is it really more profitable to try and be all things to all people (and therefore please no one) or is it possible to actually be more successful with a smaller but highly dedicated core audience?
I don't know about you, but I go to search engines to search, not to buy a car, read about the latest fashions, and bid on collectible Elvis plates as well.
---- I'm going to lead you kicking and screaming, giggling and laughing into the future.
I too remember when Altavista ruled the Earth and I still use it, mostly out of habbit, when searching for things Google is no good at. Yes, there are such things. Google has its strong points and its weak points like all the rest. You can't really support a blanket statement like "Google is far better than AltaVista ever was". I feel Altavista are still the good guys regardless of any portal nonsense because you can customise that stuff out and you don't even have to accept a cookie to do it.
--
Fuck the system? Nah, you might catch something.
Full support for real boolean searches with wildcards (although it tends to be funky on wildcard searches if its busy :() and of course the infinitely usefull near... Google is usefull for wading through a million pages of crud, but if I know what Im searching for well enough for altavista only to find tens of links its more usefull to me.
Although I don't, you might see spamverts in the response. These are trivially deleted with any spamvert blocking proxy.
Although I don't, you might see spamverts in the response. These are trivially deleted with any spamvert blocking proxy.
The popular portals give users, to a limited extent, convienient access to information. Portals also clutter the user's interface with 'noise'. I believe many users dislike this and would prefer more functional designs.
The question then becomes are there any websites('portals') that provide users with convienient access to diverse information with little 'noise' (lets define this as unwanted, distracting visual elements)? I can't find any.
Slashdot is good since you can configure the interface greatly to both simplify and eliminate various visual elements. You still can't remove the advertisments (that I'm aware of) which are very 'noisy'.
av.com/?text=y
----
Stop worrying about the risks of nuclear power and start worrying about the risks of not using nuclear power.
Amen, I have not used altavsta since the beginning of this year, when I realized that it ignored anything that it recognized as a filename ( I do windows support, so this is imperative if you are looking up an error you haven't seen before). I used google for awhile, but have settled on alltheweb.com, it's database is not as large as altavista's, but it is WAY more up to date, it queries like altavista used to as well.
_this is not a signature_
If you're using a version of Lynx that isn't horrendously outdated try typing av/?text=y
Good ol' Lynx.
The public goes nuts over stupid stuff like this!
Have you seen Alan Cox's Portaloo yet? It provides a reasonably spartan display, and seems to focus on providing information only, rather than glitz.
What's even nicer is that it's open source, and so you can modify it to provide whatever you like. :-)
--Joe--
Program Intellivision!
[...]if you look carefully, you'll find a link to the text-only page (http://www.hotbot.com/text/).
Try searching from there.
--
that large websites would all post the equivalent of a colophon. You know, an explanation of how and with what the site is built: backend programming methods (EJB, NSAPI, mod_perl), design tools, web server, database, etc.
It's always fascinating to see a little bit of a publisher's design philosophies in the colophon for a book, and I think that goes double for a web site.
--JRZ
yahoo has always plaed an emphasis on its own directory over free-text search results...for a reason - highly structured results are always preferrable to free-text search results (try searching for "linux" and see for yourself - the first two results are (1) a page dedicated to linux news, and (2) the directory entry for linux, which has hundred of organized links....i offer that this is far better than what you get from google)
You have to learn a new syntax from Altavista. I know that I'm in the habit of putting everything in quotes with a + before it from using Altavista too much.
Anyway, here's how you search for "to be or not to be" on Google:
"+to +be +or not +to +be"
If you + all the words, it ignores all the +'s. Luckily, 'not' isn't a stop-word, so you can un-plus that.
If you need to search for a phrase that's made entirely of stop-words, simply add an 'a' without a +. It'll be ignored and the rest of the search will work.
A bit confusing, but not nearly as confusing as the fact that Altavista will return pages where the words are nowhere near each other even if you put them in quotes.
--
Win dain a lotica, en vai tu ri silota
Assuming that The Portaloo uses RSS/RDF to get its headlines they should be able to use many more existing channels (including /.).
iWon.com just started, they are ANOTHER portal copy and all they do different is give out like $10,000 per day. i saw a thing on abc on them, and the founders are harvard mba's, i swear this is the beginning of the end...
-- your knees hurt, don't they?
That link helps keep Altavista as an alternative to Google (which remains my first port of call, though).
There was also an option for quickie plain text Usenet searching, although what comes to returning results it can't touch Dejanews.
Although the resulting search index doesn't appear to get sorted by relevance or even date, the found links open in delightfully basic text format, unlike with Dejanews, which dumps one back into the advertising jungle the first thing.Now, wouldn't it be nice if Google started offering Usenet searches too? Right now it seems to be a shoot between useless simplicity or more useful mess-of-a-page.
Even on Windoze browsers, the text on it is titchy. It's also not a lot of use either - looks like they might have changed the search algorithm.
Smegma.
Is it me, or are more sites these days using a font set that is just plain ugly in netscape on Linux?
Roll your own portal = weblogs!
weblogs are like little personal portals. You can go and check out what someone is looking at that day and why, just like slashdot. There are tons of them around (search for weblogs on dmoz for examples) and most are very high quality stuff, because theyre done for fun
Check out pitas.com to roll your own, it's a place that hosts them for you and does the backend stuff- that way you can get a collaborative one with a bunch of friends. just give them the password to update it, and basically make an open slashdot! someone should do this !
Just go to www.altavista.com/cgi-bin/ query?pg=aq&what=web&text if you don't want to deal with all the portal crap, and just want a quick-loading page so you can get your search done.
--
Mod up a post Rob doesn't like and you'll never mod again
--
this only results from the uniform application of very strict classification rules. so far, open directory hasn't applied these rules uniformly.
also, surfing sites is really tedious...the novelty will wear off fairly quickly for most of the volunteers. i'm sure they'll find after a while its worth it to just pay people.
I never used Dejanews that much so I can't really comment on how much it changed. But I think this indirectly leads to an interesting topic. It would be fairly easy to put your own front end and then go-between parser in front of these engines. Pretty much the "Run your search on other engines" that we see on Yahoo and Google, and the Metasearch type engines (Ask Jeeves etc.). I wonder when we will start seeing lawsuits like the ones that happened when another auction site was providing searches on E-Bay? Would it be illegal for me to slap my own front end on Dejanews? Technologically it seems really straight forward, just a few HTML forms and some Perl scripts to strip ads and useless links returned.
I actually think this also connects to the recent IM wars over buddy lists and what not. I guess these are the intellectual property issues that are only starting to be addressed.
Scuttlemonkey is a troll
Ok, so the slashdot crowd tends to be largely against frivolous software patents - why is it ok that Google is patenting such an obvious idea?
-lx
I put in my handle, which is highly specific. It won't find my page. Almost every other search engine will. It doesn't seem to be a bad search engine, it just doesn't seem to do anything remarkable. And as far as "searching algorithms" go, every search engine has one, and it's always the greatest new technology in searching. Woo.
-lx
In the beginning
AltaVista was the best.
Now it just finds spam.
Google search engine
Is much more spam resistant,
And they run Linux
Ask Jeeves is nice too.
Questions are in real English.
But replies are not.
Jeeves is metasearch.
It queries many engines,
to summarize them.
Can anyone say
What the next idea will be?
If you can, get rich.
If tits were wings it'd be flying around.
If Google _does_ decide to sell out, get a live band to webcast, etc., then the band should obviously be Moxy Fruvous.
Altavista detects lynx automatically and switches to text mode. Just "av" will do :-)
----
Stop worrying about the risks of nuclear power and start worrying about the risks of not using nuclear power.
ftp://128.253.254.56/newav.jpg
SlashMirror: Where to put files for fellow /.'ers
SlashMirror: Where to put files for fellow /.'ers
SlashMirror: Where to put files for fellow /.'ers
SlashMirror: Where to put files for fellow /.'ers
If Frank Zappa were still around.....
maybe They Might Be Giants????
-sometimes the majority only means that all the fools are on the same side
Are you people all idiots? Does it really matter to you if a web site throws a bunch of useless links on the bottom part of their site? If it helps them stay in business and provide a service to us, then all the better. It's not as if you are paying for it. The efficacy of the search hasn't changed any, so it doesn't really matter. You are all a bunch of whiners.
Scuttlemonkey is a troll
I know that different people have different searching needs, but for me, Altavista is the only search engine that'll still do what I need it to do properly.
I tend to search for stuff that might interest me as a statuephile, so I usually do phrase searched for "she turned to stone" and things like that. Altavista seems to be the ONLY search engine that can do a phrase search properly anymore. The others have been dropping that feature one by one.
Category-based search engines like Yahoo are right out, because what I want isn't categorized, and I haven't even tried any of those New Age search engines like Google, but I'd assume they work worth crap. Actually, I did try Google, just now, and it was pure crap. I don't see why anyone would expect to find anything RELEVANT from a search engine that yields the Microsoft homepage as the result of a search for "more evil than satan himself"
I hope the category-based and context-based search engines like Yahoo and Google die off, and people learn that if they want to find anything useful, they should search for some phrase that would actually be found on the page they're looking for.
The new CRAP version was up last night, but only for a little while, now the old version is back up. I hope it stays that way for a while. The new one SUCKS.
It seems it is still worth the extra keystrokes I tend to invest in typing http://www.altavista.yellowpages.com.au . It still only has a couple of ads and a few 'featured sponsers', and a nice big search text input box, free of travel advice and freemail...
if I can't find it on google. I rarely have to go to stop three. (general info searches)
+&x
It's never ceases to amaze me that people whine about additional features added to free sites. These are the same people that wish everything required command line input - grow up. From what I've seen, the site still performs the searches with the best relevance percentage and still doesn't cost anything to use. Whining about the additions of links and a little fluff to make it more palatable to the average user shows the ignorance of someone who wishes DOS was the only operating system. It's all about content, and I haven't found anyone better, including the treasured google you speak so highly of.
The reason why sites are going to the 'portal' is two fold.
1. it's what the masses want. slashdot is not the masses. AOL is the masses. the web's to complicated for them they way it is, so they want everything tied up into a nice pretty package.
2. profits. if people start using your page as there basic portal to the web, you make more money from advertising.
hey look at it this way, slashdot could even be considered a portal. it's got google, amazon, shopper.com, hey even news sites.
metalgeek
metalgeek
windows, just another pane in the glass
Sorry, but Chilly Willy is already the mascot and name of an aggressively porn-filtered search engine.
Slashdot is full of whinning kids. Altavista isnt obligated to do shit for you. Its their site and they can do whatever they want to it. You don't like it? tough. you dont matter. all the bitching and complaining you can do you are still insignifigant as far as they are concerned. You don't like portals? Awww, you're breaking their money lined hearts.
I like the new altavista portal and so will thousands of others. The "My Live" portal is the most configurable portal I have seen. I like portals because they put everything I need in one place. I dont have time to go surfing all over the web for news, weather, stock. With altavista I can see EVERYTHING that interests me in one screenful. With quick glance I can see all the news headlines and weather. I dont have to waste time going to nytimes.com only to find out I am not interested in any of the headlines. All i have to do is go to my portal and see if any headlines interest me, check the weather, and LEAVE.
Why do you whine and bitch so much about what companies do to their own sites? Do they really give two shits about your advice on how to be successful? You dont like portals because you cant stand all the celeb and entertainment shit? you dont have to see that. it is completely configurable. these companies dont force you to go to their sites. they dont give a shit about your "do one thing and do it well" advice. and the new altavista looks a hell of a lot better than slashdot.
Doesn't bother me. I've used it for so long, my fingers are still trained to type "altavista.digital.com" without errors and faster than I can even think it.
So far the screenshots look like it's almost the same... not like the move from dejanews.com to deja.com... now that sucked.
I don't click on the ads anyway for large corporations (Digital/Compaq, Yahoo, etc)...
-m
I'm living in the Midwest (Ohio) and I don't see any changes either. I don't know what the new "redesign" is supposed to be, but as long as the search engine stays the same,I don't care either way.
I'm so damn tired of every company putting a 'portal' online. I just want a page that I can search for things with. I don't want the same re-hashed AP/Reuters newsfeed that every other website has. I don't want the stupid celebrity-chats, java-games, weather, maps, webmail, shopping venues or discount long-distance phone deals.
Give give me a damn field to enter my keywords in and a button to click.
Everyone wants to corner every part of the market. What happened to 'Do one thing and do it well'? I'm not so lazy that I can't type a new address to go to a seperate webpage. If I'm on a search page that is done well (Google) and I need to catch up on the day's news, I'll take the two seconds to type in another URL.
Marketing hacks and corporate clunkheads seem to think the average web-surfer wants to stay on one webpage forever and have everything they need on that one page. I find that as tacky as going to Castco and seeing the cars and home entertainment systems on sale. If you are buying a car or a stereo-system, go to a car-dealership or a stereo store -- where you can find quality items from people who specialize in them.
I'm not going to buy my car in the next aisle down from the canned-food and I'll not get my news from the same place people search for pr0n.
To be a successful online service, you do not need to spread yourself over everything. You do not need to plaster your site with a thousand banner-ads. You do not even need to register with a search engine. Just do what you do, like what you do, and do it well. People will notice it and appreciate it.
My website, for example, was just something I threw together while I was telecommuting and learning Perl. I figured I would take the site down within a few days once I had learned how to read and dissect the script. And here I am a few months later with a very successful auction site for a very specific group of people. No search engine, no Reuter's news, no banners or advertising, no costs to anyone. And I've never even registered the site on a single search engine. (That's what robots.txt is for anyway, duh!)
My point is not that my site is so special, but that you don't have to become a commercialized sell-out to do well and you do not have to offer every service under the sky. Find something you like and stick with it. Word-of-mouth turned Fight Club from a ho-hum box-office feature to a number-one hit. It can do the same for your site.
Best of all, if you really care about what you are doing, it doesn't cost an arm and a leg. Let CBS and Tide throw a million dollars at a web project that looks and behaves like every other portal in the world -- you can have something unique to offer for a few bucks.
Speaking of which, could you imagine a project manager with any corporation presenting a website project that can be maintained for $20 per month?
The previous reasons are also why you come to Slashdot for your tech news and gossip instead of finding it burried in the back of your local newspaper, written by some washed-up entertainment editor who's greatest technical accomplishment was booting up their iMac.
---
icq:2057699
seumas.com
That's odd, on my screen in the lower right (of the table) was a "Netscape Now" button.
The AV page is the same as it's been for months. I do remember a redesign a few months ago but it was only a small one. ... and it's early Sunday morning now so I hardly think it has anything to do with where I am (though I'm not too far from /.'s home town so I should think I could see what they see).. Oh well.
Is there something special about google that makes it such a hot topic on slashdot? Or is it just that it runs on Linux? I think that's a pretty lame qualification for a search engine, if that's the case.
-lx
The main page is full of unnecessary tables and links and so forth. Searches are really poor, even if you use boolean searches, 50% of the results are irrelevant. And their database is so out of date (dead links). Adding more bloat isn't the right way to turn things right, IMHO.
Altavista used to be pretty good, now it's pretty useless. This has happened to every single search engine I've used. They were good when they first came out, but as time passes their quality starts to deteriorate. I'm not sure why this happens, I guess they just aren't maintained properly. The only decent engine now is Google, but I'm really afraid it too will start to suck in a year or two.
For example, this is the link-o-bar across the top of the page from yahoo.
Yahoo! Auctions - bid now! Coca-Cola, Dragon Ball, Halloween, Britney Spears, Pokemon... Shopping - Auctions - Yellow Pages - People Search - Maps - Travel - Classifieds - Personals - Games - Chat - Clubs Mail - Calendar - Messenger - Companion - My Yahoo! - News - Sports - Weather - TV - Stock Quotes - more...
[head spinning] Britney Spears, Pokemon ..I'm gonna hurl. . .
Each one of these demographically focused links is pointing back at the main page to prevent "leakage" (the term used when a user actually gets what they came for, and leaves the site). What's more is even *external links* are 'pass-through' links for (tracking reasons) so the user doesn't really know when they are leaving the site.
Alta-vista started out as a text only robot running on Alpha. It was fast and effective. slowly, little by little, they grew it into a link farm that is distracting and annoying to everyone. Another little trend I recently noticed , while clicking through my.CNN, is using pop-up windows that turn off the navigation and location tool bar. While it's very interesting, it forces the user to stay on-domain (because there's no nav bar) and the user doesn't know where the content is coming from (because the location bar is gone). But anyway, I digress. Back to the issue at hand.
Google is starting out the same way. A superior indexing robot generating links that are fast and effective. This week, Goggle added 2 links on the main page. Mark my words . . over the next 6 months, you'll slowly see more and more (mostly on-domain) links added to Google until it to will become a towering heap of babble.
What we users want is a link farm that actually points to content! That's why /. is my portal. That's why It's under my HOME button. That's why /. is an indispensable information source.
A link farm that 'gets to the point, and points to the get'
Now.. if only someone could build a general user link farm on the /. model?
I agree with you that AltaVista needs all those hints; I disagree that their absence from Google is a serious problem. Google just works better. IMO&E. HAND.
I did read your post, and I tryed the link you sugested.
Hotbot still blows.
Google isnt all that good. Personally I still prefer yahoo.com. I usually get the results that I want there.
AltaVista used to be my favourite search engine, basically because it gave you a good interface to a good spider/robot. AND that Spider had lots of bandwidth to go crawling.
AltaVista going the portal root is terrible. Aren't there enough of the things anyway?
Dala
(nt)
If you haven't already, check out the Open Directory Project at www.dmoz.org. It's like Yahoo!, only fluff-free, and volunteer-edited, so it's about as up-to-date as such things get. Because it is volunteer-edited, it tends to be spotty -- some areas are really well done and thorough, others not so much so. Overall, I find it meets my needs better than anywhere else does. And, in the grand tradition of open source, if I look for something and can't find it there, if I find it elsewhere, I can add it into the directory, so no one else has to suffer from the lack.
An inconvenience is only an adventure wrongly considered. -- G.K. Chesterton
Boolean statements and partial word completion. Google does none of these things, and altavista is about as good as any search engine of it's type i'm aware of. If google can't find it it's nice to be able to still have a simple layout on AV. Altavista's text-only section, yahoo and google all have their places depending on the specific search term..
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
And really, who are these people who enter topics into a search engine expecting to get something intelligent? Have they never even heard the word "Yahoo!" or something?
http://www.altavista.com/cgi-bin/query?text=on
For those who didn't know that wonderful option..
Photoshop
Illustrator
Imageready
You got beef, talk to your local Adobe rep. Actually, that would probably do more good to linux than just about anything [except Office]
The right portal formula, IMHO?
1. First and foremost, you have to take customisation/personalisation to the max. As someone else said in another message, your crucial objective is to give busy users the information they need quickly, and eliminating the noise that they don't. So have passworded individual accounts on the site, the way they do on this one, and customise, customise, customise! If you can do this correctly, you'll be providing an invaluable service to a lot of people...It doesn't have to have much to do with making a buck.
2. The banner issue:- This isn't about being money grubbing and commercialistic, but as I'm sure Commander Taco could tell you, running a popular web site costs money...and sometimes lots of it, hence his acquisition by Andover. Do the banner thing intelligently...Set up perl scripts which are able to match particular banners to people who'll be interested in them, based on account profiles...but if you do it that way, not only are people likely to not see your banners as intrusive and click on them, but who knows? If you have business users, and you're showing banner ads for business suppliers or courses, you may really be helping the user out by connecting him to that information.
3. The Web-based email issue:- Yes, there are some web based email services which really do blow goats, (Hotmail is the main one which immediately comes to mind) and yes maybe they are inherently not as secure as straight POP3, however I would argue that Joe Average User isn't going to really need absolutely bulletproof security anywayz. You put in all the standard disclaimers about not including credit card numbers in emails...and if you're really worried about it, maybe you could try and rig up pgp support somehow.
4. Spiders VS Directories:- Of course a spider is going to be tons better than a directory. A spider updates itself, whereas with a directory like Yahoo the user has to submit a site manually...and if your portal is popular, you then have to employ a batallion of auditors to go through all of the submissions. Try getting a submission on Yahoo within a week or two, and I'll be surprised if you succeed unless you're someone extremely important. Try getting a site on AltaVista, and if you've got your Meta tags and possibly a ROBOTS.TXT written correctly, it'll be there within 72 hours in many cases. ;) make a few bucks on the side.
My suggestion is that if you're thinking of putting a portal up yourself, don't even think about trying to run your own directory...Take advantage of other people who have good spider technology, but maybe a sucky portal by linking to them with one of the affiliate programs that many of them run. Use your head, and your users will thank you, the people who run the spider will thank you if they like getting exposure, and you might even (horrors!
I think that about covers most of the issues that people here seem to have grizzles with. And as I said, if you don't like the existing portals, put one together yourself! I'm in the process of doing it, and it really isn't all that difficult.
People can say portals suck, and maybe in 90% or so of cases they're right, because the faceless corps who run them *are* only interested in making money. But done correctly, I believe a good portal can be an invaluable service to everyone involved. A portal is like anything else...you do a bad portal, and it'll suck...you do a good portal, and it won't.
Slashdot itself, while not a portal par se, is I believe a good example of what I'm talking about. The customisation (the most important element of a portal, IMHO) is done cluefully, and the article system works well. It's a shame that some of it's readers aren't perhaps just a little more broad minded, but hey, you can't have everything. *grin*
I don't see why they call it a redesign when I have to scroll down to see what's happened. Besides, I never do scroll down, since I'm there to search, and nothing else. If that's what it takes to do a redesign most news-sites get redesigned every time the main headline changes.
Just use Google. Altavista, Yahoo and friends are all just marketing portals now. I'd be suprised if the info they returned was weighted against anything except the amount of advertising dollars the matches pumped into the sites.
It's one of the oldest search engines, and still the one I use most often.. As long as they don't mess with that, I don't care what else the put in.. Personally, I didn't even notice the change as I use the nice stripped text mode.
Gotta keep the money people happy, and portals are the thing right now.. Portals might be useless to your average slashdotter, but way back when, I bet you used something pretty portal-like as a homepage at one point in your early days on the web.. Personally, it was the NIN homepage back when I had to telnet to a freenet to get at Lynx... People outgrow it, but you can make some money off their eyeballs before they do..
Man that Jane's IT quiz banner flashy and annoying..
I've done something similar : I'm also learning Perl, and I threw together my personal portal, containing just links to the headlines I want, the single stock quote I'm interested in, and a funny banner. I can also send stuff in by e-mail, and it gets added to the bottom of the page (like the link about Doom System Administration)
The page might not be up to date when you read this : due to technical reasons, I can't host a site at home, so I added a crontab entry to automatically upload the page every hour. But I'm booted in windows right now, because I wanted to play some games after reading SlashDot. If you're interested in the source, or if someone has suggestions to improve it, mail me :-)
superblog.org: all your favourite blogs on o
..why don't you go to Google and, well, figure it out for yourself? If you can't be bothered with clicking on a link, entering in some text, and clicking a button, I'll give you a couple of highlights (although IANATEOG.. figuring that one out shall be an exercise for the reader -- crack that one, Signal 11 ;): 1) uses a search engine that is actually intelligent .. it checks not just for the words you wanted, but filters out any "common" words you entered (those that would index, oh, a couple billion sites or so), and checks to see if the words are close to each other in the document (which means entering in Sun Microsystems is more likely to yield what you'd expect than many other search engines) 2) there are no stupid banner ads (you'd be amazed how excited this makes a lot of people) 3) there just aren't any damn frills, period. You have the logo. You have a short blurb. Then you have a search box and a couple of buttons to choose from (along with a couple of specialized sections). I don't even think it causes a scrollbar to manifest on the front page. Nothing fancy. It just works. And it works well, unlike any other search engine I've ever come across. I could care less if it was running fscking Minix. All I know is that I have a lot better chance of finding what I want than with Yahoo!, which practically the only other "user friendly" engine I can think of (a lot of the others make me want to vomit.. oh wait, Yahoo! does too..).
So, yeah. Google sucks, but it's cool because it runs on Linux. Yeah.. or something.
~ Kish
try http://www.av.com?text=yes
for those bad browser days
Google is a great site because it finds things for you on the web, and does a superb job of it. Portals, by definition, attempt to do everything, and must perforce do them all more or less badly.
Alta Vista - a once-great search site of the early web that faded into insignificance in the wave of millenial suicides that was triggered by the passing fad for all-purpose portal sites. (from The Twenty-second Century Encyclopedia of Technology)
Check out the start page I made for myself. I keep it up-to-date and have gotten some good compliments on it. The tools are the best part of it. I use them often.
Phillip
http://www.altavista.com/cgi-bin/query? text No bells and whistles, just a clean search interface. This is how I've been accessing it for quite some time.
The only thing I find that makes it useable is the hack to sneak it into the classic interface by adding =dnc/ to the url straight after the hostname. So my bookmark to dejanews now points to: http://www.deja.com/=dnc/mydn_forums.xp At least it gets rid of the horrible cringeworthy colours... The free email account also makes a useful spam bucket. ian.
My intranet site is chock full o' CSS and it looks just fine, so it's not that.... (unless they are specifying 'doze only fonts)
Yes, this is a well put together page, nice use of fonts. Sans Serif can be used in a legible manner, it's just not that way on the new altavista page.
I like to use AltaVista just to search stuff. :)
This is how it was since I have first found it,
and how it is now. I really dont see the point
of having "yet another portal". Infact, ever
since AltaVista started putting more portal-like
features and graphics, I began to use only the
text-version of the site.. until they removed
the link to it, as well!
...actually, that version still exist, even
though there is no official reference to it
in the page (as far as I've seen, that is.).
Here is a direct URL to it. Its just a search
field. No graphics, no portal. Pure altavista!
http://www.altavista.com/cgi-bin/query?text
I think we should all go over to The Media Foundation, a group that has been tr/ying to fight corporations for a few years and whose magazine, adbusters, won this year's magazine of the year for 1999 from the Canadian National Magazine Awards. The magazine is more interesting then the website, but their campaigns are very interesting to those of us who hate being in the rich people's casino.
OFTC: By the community, for the community