Yahoo Puts AltaVista To Death 176
An anonymous reader writes "Remember AltaVista from the late '90s? Yahoo is finally pulling life support and letting Altavista die a noble death after over 15 years of hard service." You can only take so many years of being a running gag.
Re:AltaVista (Score:5, Interesting)
Yeah - loved it in the early days, but Google just nuked it as far as speed of search results and page load time went, and then it went the way of the dodo. One of the things they did far better than Google for a long time was translate. Google's first few passes at it produced some pretty horrible translations and lacked much of an idiom database, something they've vastly improved since (milchgesicht comes out 'baby face' now, not 'milk face' when translated from German, for instance, and Altavista's babelfish was one of the few that got it correct for a long time).
Ah the memories (Score:5, Interesting)
I remember back in the day AltaVista was the only search engine which allowed you to use + and - to fine-tune the results. Before Google's pagerank that was the best you could hope for.
Re:AltaVista (Score:4, Interesting)
I totally remember altavista (Score:3, Interesting)
From the for what it's worth department... (Score:5, Interesting)
I remember back in the day AltaVista was the only search engine which allowed you to use + and - to fine-tune the results. Before Google's pagerank that was the best you could hope for.
From the for what it's worth department... when Google dropped the ability to force inclusion of specific search terms, which was shortly before it introduced Google+, it was incredibly contentious inside Google itself, and a lot of Google employees at the time, myself included, complained bitterly about the ability to get accurate results any more.
Most of use were natural lexicographers who could think hierarchically enough that we knew the search terms we wanted in order to get the results we wanted. surprising how we ended up working at a search engine, right? About 2/3rds of us really felt they were "dumbing down" search in order to use the same datastores for normal search as the first and second order relationships being used to generate targetted advertising results. Altavista was mentioned *a lot*.
Re:AltaVista (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:From the for what it's worth department... (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:From the for what it's worth department... (Score:5, Interesting)
If I want to search for exact words in any order, "A" "B" "C" is NOT the same as +A +B +C was, since it doesn't force inclusion. Instead I get ""best" and "useful" results, rather than results based on my judgement.
This is great for most people, who don't know how search engines work, don't care, or are just looking for sponsored results or porn, but it's not that useful to, for example, get results containing technical reports and papers in a particular field (for example). For CS, there's citeseer searching, but for biology and other fields, it's a real pain.
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)