Altavista was fantastic and represented a features and usability high water mark that was never passed by google.
replyFull boolean operator search with "literals" actually respected, negative search terms worked as advertised, etc.
None of that ever worked properly, consistently, at google.
> None of that ever worked properly, consistently, at google.
replyMy experience is it worked pretty well on Google for a while, but then it got progressively worse.
Right, for this first 5 years or so, it worked. But then they started to optimize for “the masses”, and they don’t use boolean logic in queries.
replyThey optimized for ad impressions. There was no technical reason not to keep around a Boolean mode - some competitors effectively exist because of that single feature.
replyAgreed. AltaVista was the best of the pre-Google search engines. I seem to remember Google having negative terms, literals and booleans (at least or/and) - although they weren't well documented, they worked. Amazon had literals and negative terms too for many years. Now searching on both of those sites is "search theater", where they pretend to give targeted results while burying the result you're looking for just deep enough to maximize page views before too many users bounce.
replyI fucking hate we now live in a world where leading companies A/B test precisely how much they can degrade their core product value and annoy users knowing they're safe from competitors because startups know if they threaten Google/Amazon on that stuff they'll just put back the minimum functionality long enough to ensure the new player dies.
I pay for kagi on my personal machine, it is always a delight when my cmd-t search is answered kagi and not a list of ads ...
replyI would think that 90% of the principals at DEC/Compaq WRL working on AltaVista would have moved to google, their first office was nearby in downtown Palo Alto back in 1999.
replyIt is absolutely insane to say that Altavista was better than Google though.
replyTry Kagi, it implements them quite well.
replyIt worked pretty well on early google and altavista. Find an archive of searchlores.org from that era and see for yourself. +Fravia had documented and tested the features quite thoroughly
replyI think they also allowed distance between words (within x) to increase relevance.
replyI cannot read AltaVista without thinking of Astalavista[.box.sk].
replyMee to :D
replyAnd at the time it was still an open question whether search engines or curated oracles like Yahoo would be what stuck in the long term.
replyAround this time you also had meta search engines, which gave you the dedup'd results of all the major search engines at the time. There was MetaCrawler and Dogpile from what I remember, both of which are oddly still around.
replyAltaVista and HotBot for me. Yahoo wasn't a search engine, it was a manually curated website directory (with a hierarchical structure), which was great for finding similar websites if you found one you liked.
replyYou could get search results on yahoo. The directory results would come first and then search results from their current “partner.” At one point it was Inktomi, the Berkeley company behind HotBot. At one point it was Google. Before them, one of the more generic ones.
replyoriginally it was directory only, wasn’t until fairly late they adddd an alta vista fallback.
replyI remember AltaVista being the only really credible search engine prior to Google (I took a brief detour to Excite but kept going back to AltaVista). Jeeves I only remember for the freeform query gimmick.
replyAltaVista had a Java applet that would visualize the "clusters" that a search produced. You could then click on a "cluster" in order to exclude all the irrelevant ones and the search results would update.
replyFor example: Searching on "python" would give you two obvious clusters one for "reptiles" and one for "programming languages". Clicking on the appropriate cluster would screen out all the irrelevant ones.
This is a feature still unmatched by any search engine today.
I've never seen this feature despite using a lot altavista back then. What a pity
replyDon't forget WebCrawler!
replyYahoo was pretty good until they removed comments from their posts as well as removing Yahoo Answers.
replyI loved the chaos of Yahoo answers.
I remember messed up questions like “Can humans get preggo from midgets” and things of that nature.
I remember vividly how lycos was much better than google
replyNobody remembers Hotbot. Google before Google.
replyI remember. Powered by Inktomi.
replyAlta Vista had more relevant search results than Google has now.
replyFor all practical purposes, internet search is dead or dying. It has been enshittified to perfection by multiple parties. Those who could have been called users in a previous life are the ones getting the least use out of it. For a brief period of time, LLMs can help. Until their inevitable decay into ad-infested hellscapes makes them just as useless. They don't have ad blockers.
replyYou hear analysts talk about the majority of corporations being in the infancy of their understanding of language models. Shudder to think of the slop mature players will put out.
replyAnd now every search engine has been flooded with SEO’d AI slop and they all suck again.
replyKagi has done a good job of making it easy to cut through slop so far. I never really deal with slop search results
replyExactly. Before google came out in I think 1998, I had several bookmarked sites like excite.com, altavista, dogpile, yahoo, and yes askjeeves. You kinda had a feeling for which one would be good for which kind of search. But then google came along...
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