A Eulogy For AltaVista, The Google Of Its Time

http://searchengineland.com/altavista-eulogy-165366

by gregosaur • 13 years ago

103 49 13 years ago

joshuak3• 13 years ago

I remember when google came out I didn't quite understand what was different, and hated the fact that I couldn't use operators such as +-(). The feeling lucky button further reinforced the feeling that google was a dumbed down interface for the masses that wasn't for professionals. Took me a bit to realize that the results where better then AltaVista regardless of the reduced sculptability.

EDIT: haha now it's been so long I've even forgotten the operators. They where the boolean operators AND, OR, NOT etc. spelled out, and other very useful sculpting tools.

http://www.netstrider.com/search/altavista.html

wslh• 13 years ago

In the early times of Google I switched back and forth to Altavista because the NEAR operator was the way to adjust the precision of my terms.

threeseed• 13 years ago

I remember when Google came out and vividly remember what was different. It was the UI. It was clean, sparse and without any ads.

For me the search results were across the board worse than Altavista but better specifically in searching API documentation.

sixothree• 13 years ago

It's hard to believe today but one innovation in the google home page was that you didn't actually have to click into the text box to begin typing. For some reason every other search engine at the time required you to do this one little extra step.

altcognito2• 13 years ago

In the initial time where alta vista were seriously co-existing as search engines (on that graph, in the time before they crossed paths in usage) Alta Vista was a little nicer because it really was a much more raw look at the web. If I did a search for 4 keywords in a row, the first ten hits were generally an exact match. (there weren't as many cloned sites etc... so this was a reasonable thing to do)

I miss that aspect of the web.

rodgerd2• 13 years ago

Really? I started using Google before it had its own domain, and was eagerly showing to people. AltaVista had started shitting up its interface with intrusive ads by then IIRC, but more importantly while the arcane combinations I needed to get decent results made me feel like a wizard, I could get as good if not better responses just typing a few terms into Google.

ChuckMcM• 13 years ago

I agree with Danny it is a sad sendoff for what was such a transformative technology. DEC never did understand open anything, and the Internet was always more of threat to them than a way to move forward.

PommeDeTerre3• 13 years ago

Maybe licensing issues would prevent it, or make it difficult or costly to do, but I think it would be superb if at least some of the source code powering AltaVista were to be released under a liberal open source license. This is especially true if it's no longer a feasible product.

The code from the Digital era, for instance, would be quite a contribution to the Internet community, even if just for the sake of preserving historically-important software.

cmarschner• 13 years ago

AltaVista has been a front-end for Yahoo search for >10 years... Not a lot of source code left...

PommeDeTerre3• 13 years ago

Is this just speculation? Or do you have first-hand experience at Yahoo!, or something to that effect, to back up this claim?

Zigurd2• 13 years ago

It must be depressing sometimes to think of things like AltaVista that Yahoo had run into the ground under leadership that apparently didn't understand the assets they owned.

When AltaVista first appeared, I had used Lexis quite a bit, and had built my own inverted index for law forms. I thought "Wow, you can do that to Web pages!"

But it is even more depressing to keeping dragging the corpse of AltaVista around. Time to let go.

mathattack• 13 years ago

Exactly. Once Google beat it, no need to keep the corpse around. Not sure what Yahoo could do. Their own search had already surrendered.

robryan• 13 years ago

I guess they had a significant amount of people who had never moved on. Better to serve them up something they knew than push they to Yahoo search and have then actually think about searching options.

Over time I guess that number become small enough that maintaining a separate brand is no longer worth the likely small amount of effort to do it.

rodgerd2• 13 years ago

Honestly, it's more depressing to think of the things Digital ran into the ground:

VMS (let's keep it expensive and hard to get ahold of while Unix is getting cheaper, and oh, then we'll decide we're a Windows shop anyway).

Flogging off their database technology to Oracle.

Alpha. Poor, poor Alpha.

The waste of giving the StrongARM to Intel, who would ultimately kill it.

AltaVista, of course.

Tru64's good bits (like AdvFS) was criminally wasted, although I guess that's more HP's fault in the end.

Zigurd2• 13 years ago

Very true. DEC could have been a major router maker, could have been Google, could have been a major CPU maker, could have been a major database vendor, and could have had a major piece of the PC business. That's got to be the world championship of neglecting great engineering (maybe excepting Xerox). Poor AltaVista went from a neglectful parent to a neglectful foster home.

_delirium• 13 years ago

babelfish.altavista.com was also the translate.google.com of its time

jahmed• 13 years ago

Ahhh babelfish. So many poorly translated high school spanish papers.

rsync• 13 years ago

I miss altavista every single day.

Every time I search for a collection of terms, and then click the links, and page-search for one of those terms, and it's not in the page.

Google wastes my time like this 3-4 times per day.

PavlovsCat2• 13 years ago

You can use "intext:blah" to make sure "blah" actually occurs in the page body itself: http://www.googleguide.com/advanced_operators_reference.html

joshuak3• 13 years ago

Just out of curiosity why is search text actually occurring in the page body an 'advanced' feature?

zzzz1232• 13 years ago

This feature will probably be removed at the next Google search "upgrade". Just like allinanchor: OR allintext: OR allinurl: OR allintitle:

cynwoody• 13 years ago

Sometimes it helps to use the Search tools | Verbatim option to keep Google from drawing unwarranted conclusions about a page's relevance.

They used to allow you to mark required terms with a +-sign, but unfortunately they took that feature out a while back.

Semaphor• 13 years ago

Today you have to use quotes: "searchterm"

Pretty annoying as it requires two signs and at more than one place but at least it still allows me to search.

nano111• 13 years ago

I miss Google from ~5 years ago

pjmlp2• 13 years ago

Me too, specially now with all the URL rewriting, language and IP filtering they do.

As I travel around the world, I need to keep changing my search settings to find what I want.

felixfurtak• 13 years ago

If my memory serves me AltaVista had good newsgroup support too. It was even possible to manually uudecode binary files from the search results.

jmboling• 13 years ago

Sadly, google was just easier to type.

dm8• 13 years ago

I believe people like Jeff Dean and Sanjay Ghemawat who became instrumental in Google's success came from DEC. I'm sure they brought lot of talented folks from DEC that paved what Google's search dominance.

whiddershins• 13 years ago

I remember teaching a friend how to research a topic by sitting her down in front of the computer, and showing her how to search all 5 major engines instead of just one, thereby getting a number of perspectives on the topic.

This article makes me seriously nostalgic.

INTPenis• 13 years ago

I remember the dark side, astalavista. My entry into the world of exploratory computing. ;)

henrikschroder• 13 years ago

I remember the domain switch, and how previously the guy who actually had altavista.com used to have a little box on his personal website telling people looking for that other altavista search thing to go over here...

xedarius• 13 years ago

I remember sitting around my friends house and he showed me AltaVista, I think previously I had been using Yahoo. He said have a go, so I typed some stuff into the box and then it listed a bunch of stuff, "cool eh?", my friend said.

"Well kind of", I replied, but none of the things it returned are what I'm looking for.

Oh no, that's not how it works, he explained. You have then find your actual results somewhere on the 2nd or 3rd page. Or narrow the results with a curious combinations of + and -.

If only I had connected the dots perhaps I would have written Google myself.

drallison• 13 years ago

Altavista's creator and original implementor was Paul Flaherty (1964-2006) (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Flaherty). Altavista (altavista.dec.com) began life in his office at the DEC Network Research Lab in Palo Alto, CA. As Altavista usage grew, it consumed machines (alphas in those days), filling his office and moving into the hallway. Eventually it moved to its own facility and became something more than a research project.

Altavista was, pre-Google, the best of the search engines. I am fairly sure that the original idea for Altavista was a droll comment made by Andy Freeman at lunch that sketched the possibility of a smarter-than-inverted-list search engine for the Internet; Paul made it all happen.

A Eulogy For AltaVista, The Google Of Its Time

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