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.

Comments

text only Altavista

[two_can]

http://www.altavista.com/cgi-bin/query?opt=on&en c=iso88591&text=on
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.

Chilly Willy

[Seumas]

I'm sure Google would choose the likes of Chilly Willy the penguin, of cartoon fame. Or perhaps the old penguin from the penguin and polar-bear duo of Arctic Circle fame (I haven't seen one of those restaurants in years. Mmm. And remember their Fry Sauce? Oh, now I'm hungry.).

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.
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icq:2057699
seumas.com

Link Farms . . glow your own

[Money__]

I vividly remember when Yahoo.com was a great little index. Simple, quick loading, up-to-date, a joy to use. However, the trend seems to be that once a search engine gets noticed, they start doing things to track and keep users on the site. They add links that point back to there own "content" (which isn't really content at all, but just another step into the hierarchy) after 2 or 3 clicks down. the user is finally shown what he/she came for, but in the process, the user is shown a steaming heap of on-domain links. This exasperates even the most uneducated user.

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?