I was the first corporate web master for AltaVista and joined in January 1996 to manage everything except for the actual search engine itself.<p>It was my first real job at a large company and taught me a lot about working in corporate America.<p>I saw so many mistakes made within the year I worked there that were obvious even at the time for a lot of us that worked there, but at the same time there are many similarities to what happens with other very well funded projects trying to make sense of a new technology and way of doing businesses within a large very important company with a very different business model.<p>I have seen virtually the exact same playbook happen in the enterprise blockchain space in multiple occasions over the last 5 years.<p>It is sad in many ways to see what happened to DEC (probably more so than AltaVista). It was such an innovative company back in the 60s and 70s, but unlike IBM weren't able to reinvent themselves in first the new 80s world of PCs and then later internet. Classic case of innovators dilemma.<p>AltaVista itself largely died, because in a misguided attempt to manage the innovators dilemma they just tried to rebrand everything network oriented they had as AltaVista.<p>People only remember the search engine now and for good reason. But we had AltaVista firewalls, gigabit routers, network cards, mail server (both SMTP and X400 (!!!) and a bunch of other junk without a coherent strategy. Everything that had anything to do with networking got the AltaVista logo on it.<p>The focus became on selling their existing junk using the now hip AltaVista brand, but the AltaVista search itself was not given priority.<p>I learnt a lot from my experience there, grew to be extremely skeptical, learnt to love Dilbert and also learnt how cool the DEC Hardware and Digital Unix was compared to the Sun Sparc and Solaris stuff I had to work on afterwards.
It's hard to explain just how good Google was back in the day, compared to those early search engines.<p>I distinctly remember someone suggesting it to me at our CS lab in college. A few of us had never heard of it, and we all started to do some searches to try it out. There was silence for about 5 minutes, and then someone said "this is really good."<p>Say what you want about what Google has turned into, but it was an incredibly important tool that came around at the right time.<p>Also, it makes me really happy that they've kept the "I'm Feeling Lucky" button around.
What drew me to AltaVista was that it gave me results that didn't exist elsewhere. It took some boolean gymnastics to get precise results, or going a few pages deep, but stuff, if it existed, was findable.<p>I almost wish there were less precise and more obscure options out there today. A search engine that purposefully didn't index mainstream news, social media, nor shopping/product sites.
The head librarian at my high school was an older lady in her early 60s, and she suggested that I use Google because it was the best search engine. Back then I used Webcrawler, but there wasn't too much distance between the competition.<p>I thought it was weird that "googol" was spelled incorrectly and that Google's logo was ugly even by Paint Shop Pro 4 standards. It looked like search for kids. I assumed the librarian didn't know anything about computers and dismissed her advice. Within a few months everyone was using Google.
When will somebody replace Google (and Bing) with one that actually works again? Is the cost of entry that high? Is there no business model to permit one to operate at some level of profit?<p>I'm sure most here have been frustrated by the difficulty of getting "good" results on searches, even with modifiers. But what most troubles me is Google's memory/history has grown smaller and smaller, as if it has Alzheimers - searches that used to return results now bring back none.
I only browsed the article but had fond memories of how revolutionary AltaVista was when it launched. Suddenly you could browse the web without following links. This started a trend where you provided lesser and lesser value by stuffing links on your homepages (yes this was a thing) as people didn't need the links anymore.<p>Some years later I remember AltaVista suddenly became full of paid links and ads, to the point of unusability. This is when Google came in, with no ads, no paid links, and actual good search results.<p>The irony.. now Google fills at least half the first search page with paid for links and unusable results.<p>Unfortunately, nobody (in the long run) gives away something completely for free. I would pay $1-2/month for a search portal without paid links and no sell-off of my private info.
I remember having AltaVista as my primary bookmark, until they accelerated the ads and monetization, and render it almost completely useless. It was so obvious they wanted to make quick, obscene money from of it. They cared very little about the negative impact that had on user experience. That's why AltaVista went like the dodo. Period.
I very distinctly remember when AltaVista removed support for "quoted words and phrases" in queries. I was studying CS in college at the time. I think that's when we switched en masse to Google.
I still miss AltaVista's query language. So much better at narrowing stuff down to _exactly_ want you wanted then google is, even today. Between googles "let me guess what you want and ignore search terms" and their paid placements, page 1 of the SERP is useless for technical work. Doubly so if your researching something obscure...
I still remember when I was first introduced to google in the 5th grade. Our computer class taught us about search engines and how to find information online. They showed us lycos, altavista, dogpile, ask jeeves, etc. and everyone in the class had their favorite site they would use when working on projects.<p>Within a day of showing us google, every kid in the class used google exclusively. They were so much better than their competition at the time.
I loved Altavista. The thinking had to be done by the user, but uf you understood the process, it was a precise and accurate tool. Before it got sold around, of course.<p>I'd construct searches along the lines of:<p>(Word OR Word) AND (Word NEAR Word)<p>And get great results. Of course, the Web is way to big and Javascript-y for that now.
Being a predecessor is not a failure. Au contraire.<p>One of Dawkins' memorable lines is "<i>Descendents are common. Ancestors are exceptionally rare</i>"<p>You could say crocodilians succeeded and dinosaurs failed. A croc is still a croc, but the dinosaurs are hummingbirds and seagulls. If you think about it though, both are ancestors... an exceptional success.<p>Altavista is a Khan.
I owe most of my career to AltaVista after comp.lang.<i>, comp.unix.</i>, and comp.databases.* -- even more so because AltaVista had indexed Internet newsgroups.
Am I the only one who thinks this article is very poorly written? It doesn't really tell all the strategic reasons why Altavista fell into oblivion and its structure is all over the place.<p>I also love Paul Graham's framework for imagining the future and working backwards. If we think like that, Google is nowhere near the form of a final solution to information retrieval. An ideal state would be to retrieve information correct the first time with everything you need bundled into the page. If that problem is solved, then you have to tackle the question of why the user was asking the query in the first place, and how your product can help people have a solution to their answer so that the query is never repeated!
I joined a set-top box startup in 2002 based in Palo Alto (Digeo) that ran out of the former Altavista offices - same building as PAIX.<p><a href="https://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2009/02/11/paix-a-key-hub-from-alta-vista-to-facebook" rel="nofollow">https://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2009/02/11/paix...</a><p>I ran a build cluster in the server room in the basement where Altavista used to be located. The server room was actually pretty small - just a few rows of racks. We still had a sign in our office that said "Altavista Operations". It's pretty mindblowing just thinking how small internet-scale things were back then compared to now.
I think the first search engine I used was Magellan. Until AltaVista happened. Loved AltaVista, until Hotbot/Inktomi, which was the only one I had trouble letting go of, I think only because of their really clean and minimal UI. Even when Google came along I was one of the few that had a finite number of web sites I used to use that made Google virtually useless to me. The only search engine I use now is DDG.<p>It was as insane marginalising Google back then as so many other tech fads since then, including IOT, Bitcoin, XP/agile, Netbooks, 3D TVs (remember those?), and so on.<p>There is an upside to not having used anything Google - to this day I have zero reliance on any single product of theirs.
1) Google was the only search engine at that time that understood the power of search. Yahoo pushed its search box below the fold. Lycos, AV tried to bring more "content" to the search page.
2) It was blazingly fast.
3) It allowed you to test your current search with the competition search engines. After a few times you did that, you realized they were by far the best, and did not try it anymore.
After the dot com crash? many of the spiders just stopped indexing new content. The altavista index became way out of date. If you weren't already in a yahoo category you weren't getting in. Dmoz didn't even have the editors to appoint any new editors... It was less a failure than a mass giving up, as if everyone had gone but forgotten to turn the servers off when they left.
AltaVista was the first search engine I used. It was the best, because I hadn't seen anything else.<p>Then a colleague introduced me to the early version of google.com - a minimum viable product, before that phrase became popular.<p>Within a short period of time, without being aware of it, I almost completely stopped using AltaVista, because Google was so much better.<p>Memories.
I miss the NEAR keyword. I gather that Google has AROUND(n), or did at some point (one never knows with them), but damn, NEAR was pretty helpful when you had a nicely constructed Boolean that wasn't quite getting you what you needed.
Yeah it's a shame. Digital could have been the Google. Probably a much better one (it can't get much worse than Google's privacy invasion, after all).
Ahh, that day when I was introduced with the search engine & internet, they took us some kids to library PCs. The librarian instructed us to open altavista and said:<p>If you want to find Mr. Bean and will search for "Bean", you will find... beans. Type "Mr. Bean".<p>Only years later someone told me about google.
This line from the Wiki jumped out at me:<p>> As of 1998, it used 20 multi-processor machines using DEC's 64-bit Alpha processor. Together, the back-end machines had 130 GB of RAM and 500 GB of hard disk drive space,<p>I'm typing this on a machine with 20 threads, 64GB of RAM, and a hair over 12TB of disk.
From the same era, I still remember Excite Extreme:
<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aw9x5us4ZM4" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aw9x5us4ZM4</a><p>Not useful, except for the bling factor. 3D VR search in 1998!
I remember AltaVista even had a free dialup service. IIRC, it was like netzero, in that it displayed ads in a window that stayed on top. Of course, I would just find the window handle and set it to invisible
When I tried the Google search engine in 1998 for the first time, I dropped AltaVista like a hot potato and never looked back.<p>Any subsequent AltaVista history is pretty much an irrelevant "all over but the shouting".
Is there a search engine which displays 4-6 thumbnails of top sites? I feel google results are just giant walls of text that you randomly pick one. If you could actually see the relevant text on the website, you'd not even have to click?
Interesting, didn't know this was just a tech showcase. And it's always puzzling how management fails to monetize something new and successful. It seems most are only able to copy competitors.
Unrelated, but does anybody remember a site called astalavista.com? It had a lot of script kiddie tools, among them sub7, msn messenger flooders etc. I miss the early internet.
Google Search today is repeating the same mistakes I remember from the late 90s.<p>For the first decade of the web, there were a handful of search engines competing, rising and falling in popularity. The best were altavista, and fast.<p>One thing that was noticeable back then was that bad search engines (and search engines that 'jumped the shark' and became bad) generally did so in similar ways:<p>a) they included paid results, or devoted too much real-estate to advertising<p>b) when they failed to find results, they tried to trick the user by showing related results (eg: omitting or substituting terms)<p>c) they avoided 'logical and' for search terms, in favor of 'logical or', making it difficult for users to search with precision.<p>The people at Google surely believe their recent changes have nothing to do with all that. Far as I'm concerned, aside from the extra millions of dollars they've spent on AI research, it's the same old story. Nobody needs a somewhat smarter version of AskJeeves.