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.
Obligatory (Score:5, Funny)
I won't believe it until Netcraft confirms it
Comment removed (Score:5, Funny)
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Windows is absolutely not VMS. They share a common founding father [wikipedia.org], but (Open)VMS is still easily considered far more capable and forward thinking in many respects than Windows ever has been.
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
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Looks like they can already confirm the death of TFA's bandwidth allotment.
Any "life support" from Yahoo so we can read it?
at least we still have Dogpile and Ask Jeeves (Score:5, Funny)
You'll never make me use Google!
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We have ways!!!!
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its no longer ask jeeves it just ask now and isn't that good compared to google in my humble opinion.
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Oddly the UK version [ask.com] still uses the Ask Jeeves branding, though I think it's not actually different.
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That's probably because there are more people named "Jeeves" in the UK.
It's the 5797th [publicprofiler.org] ranked name in Great Britain, and it looks like there are about 1500 "Jeeveses".
In 1881, the year P.G. Wodehouse was born, they were mostly in Hertfordshire [publicprofiler.org]
Re:at least we still have Dogpile and Ask Jeeves (Score:5, Funny)
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Not for the plebs in my office. I keep finding the Ask toolbar and McAffee shite on [self employeed] brokers' computers - it turns out the update installers don't remember your preference - why would they, it would mean less installs.
Running gag? (Score:5, Funny)
Running gag (Score:4, Insightful)
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Hotbot, then Altavista. From then on, it's Googles all the way down.
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Lycos, Excite, Inktomi...
Don't forget those AOL signup CD-ROM's (often >1) that fell out of the bags you brought home from CompUSA.
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Inktomi was the power behind Hotbot. I never found Lycos or Excite to be useful, except when Lycos had an FTP search.
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...which was another ftpsearch, at the time.
I'm somewhat saddened when I look just now and find that all of my old ftpsearch sites are gone. But somewhat relieved when I realize that I really haven't needed them in a decade or so, which is why I didn't notice that they'd disappeared.
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Forget the FTP search engines, most of the old FTP sites are gone.
I miss WUARCHIVE.WUSTL.EDU. I downloaded Doom from there...
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ftp://nic.funet.fi/ [funet.fi] is still there. It's oh-my-god slow, though.
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if funet.fi is still around then sunsite.unc.edu probably is too.... ah yes, it's now called "ibiblio"
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I miss free AOL cd's...now I have to buy roadside mailbox reflectors and party coasters.
Back in the Days of Kerosene Internet (Score:2)
Now, wasn't it astavista that provided me with so much reasonably priced software?
Re:Back in the Days of Kerosene Internet (Score:5, Informative)
Now, wasn't it astavista that provided me with so much reasonably priced software?
No, it was www.astalavista.box.sk
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Kids today have no idea how much you appreciate Photoshop when you've downloaded in one file using a dial-up modem.
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And on dial-up, that used to take about 6 minutes per 1mb zip file, and always when the download reached 99% the dreaded 'click - Purrrrrrrrrrr' of the modem disconnecting happened, so you would have to download it all again after dialling up again.
Used to take days to get big files.
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And on dial-up, that used to take about 6 minutes per 1mb zip file, and always when the download reached 99% the dreaded 'click - Purrrrrrrrrrr' of the modem disconnecting happened, so you would have to download it all again after dialling up again.
Used to take days to get big files.
That reminds me of how awesome zmodem was with its resume capability. That changed things for the better. Then we moved on to http and lost resume for the longest time again...
Re:Back in the Days of Kerosene Internet (Score:5, Funny)
Lycos? (Score:2)
Lycos anyone?
Used to use it, it was the best (Score:2)
I say ... (Score:2)
so long. I learned SEO on altavista & launched (Score:2)
I first learned search engine optimization by studying Alatavista, then moved on to Hotbot (Inktomi).
That was the beginning of a great business, and my first good paying job.
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.
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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.
I remember back in the day when Google was a search engine that actually responded correctly to + and - to fine-tune results, and when Google even listened to the actual words you typed, rather than replacing them with what it thinks are synonyms or sometimes random words that have nothing to do with what I'm searching for.
I gave up using Google over a year ago because it had become so hard to get it to actually search for the exact words I type, instead of having it try to guess what I mean.
If I wanted
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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: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.
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Yeah, I'm still ticked off that I can't force term searches anymore. Google does really well most of the time, but sometimes I need a particular word or the exclusion of a particular word, and Google doesn't obey anymore.
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And its "NEAR" operator allowed me to fine-tune the results in ways unmatched even by today's search engines.
Parentheses, boolean operators, the NEAR operator... Altavista was the true hacker's choice for powerful web search. We don't lose it today, though: We lost it when it was turned into a rebranded Yahoo.
Anyway, the "running gag" comment just goes to show how low this place has sunk.
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It's been a sad joke since Yahoo ripped out the search engine with the operators and wildcards and parentheses, and made it a front end for Yahoo's. That was maybe a year after the acquisition (2003).
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You can use '-' on Google searches.
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Yea, but it doesn't work. Google simply isn't able to do text searches anymore. They can return as many fast half-assed results as I can stand, but not one single accurate result.
Wanna get a list of pages that don't contain the test altavist? Simple just search for -altavista. Yea, doesn't work.
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That's because you negated your entire search string. Try "search -altavista". Works just fine, no altavista results.
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it most certainly does work, you're doing something wrongly.
http://www.googleguide.com/advanced_operators_reference.html [googleguide.com]
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Also something that would be computationally intensive compared to what they do now, and only of value in limited circumstances. It could be done, but probably isn't worth it.
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Heck, make it a subscription service.
I totally remember altavista (Score:3, Interesting)
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Didn't it also have the option to do a search and then do a second search within the results of the first one?
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Yes! How I loved that.
Alternatives... (Score:3)
Looks like it's back to using the alternative [cmu.edu].
Arnie Says... (Score:2, Funny)
Alta la vista Baby!
Or something like that...
Ping Tests (Score:2)
altavista.digital.com (Score:3)
I remember when the original URL was http://altavista.digital.com/ [digital.com]
In the early days it even recognized Pathworks Mosaic 1.0 by its user agent, and served up a really, really simple HTML page just for it.
There was even a Personal version of the search engine that you could download and run on your own server to index your Intranets.
Sad to see it go because the world really needs more diversity when it comes to search engines. If there is something the Big Engines don't want you to have, it might as well not exist.
good stuff (Score:2)
Asta Lavista (Score:5, Funny)
baby.
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That's a funny way to say .box.sk, Ahnold :)
Where it all began (Score:5, Informative)
AltaVista was a huge innovation. Nobody at the time thought that someone could provide a search service for the entire internet for free. DEC rented the old vacant telephone building behind the Walgreens in downtown Palo Alto. (That building now houses the Palo Alto Internet Exchange, which at one time was the major Silicon Valley switching node for the Internet.) They installed DEC Alpha rack-mounted machines. The whole thing was a demo of DEC Alpha technology, to show that a large number of DEC machines could do things no mainframe could.
That was a huge change from previous data center construction. Until then, most data centers had raised floors and nice cabinets. Telephone central offices, though, had tall open racks firmly bolted to the building, with cable trays overhead. AltaVista was the first big data center built that way. Telcos were better at cable management than computer services in those days. Using telco-style cable management turned out to be a huge win.
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Nobody at the time thought that someone could provide a search service for the entire internet for free.
Except OpenText/Yahoo who did it a year earlier.
They installed DEC Alpha rack-mounted machines.
No they didn't. They had a single massive DEC Alpha Server with some untold number of GB of RAM, which at the time was unprecedented. Using racks of machines was an idea developed later by Eric Brewer from Excite.
The whole thing was a demo of DEC Alpha technology, to show that a large number of DEC machines could do things no mainframe could.
It was released as a demo of what a single AlphaServer machine could do. The project started by people who thought "wouldn't it be cool if..." and then the marketing droids released it as a demo. The single machine architecture bottlenecked their inde
yea I do remember (Score:2)
it was the only search engine at the time that let you do +- stuff and return even less meaningful results
next we are going to have a candlelight service for lycos?
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next we are going to have a candlelight service for lycos?
Who even owns Lycos any more? Last I heard Telefonica sold them off to some Korean investors who shut the place down to minimal size.
Whowhere (which they acquired to get MailCity, which became Lycos Mail) still exists but I can't imagine what people database it searches.
Re:AltaVista (Score:5, Insightful)
Yeah, but it's not what it used to be.
Back in the day, it was the best search engine out there. Used it dozens of times every day. Granted, that was back when "www.hp.com" was an invalid URL and you had to use "www.hp.boise.com" to get a printer driver, but still....
Can't necessarily say I''m "sad" to see them go, but it does raise a little pang of nostalgia.....
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).
Re:AltaVista (Score:5, Informative)
Re:AltaVista (Score:5, Insightful)
I stopped using Altavista when they nuked the "NEAR" keyword.
Re:AltaVista (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:AltaVista (Score:4, Insightful)
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It's not so much that they didn't see the potential; it's that they couldn't let go of their legacy business to pursue other avenues while that legacy was so much of their culture and revenue.
DEC saw Unix coming and responded with Ultrix; they saw internet search coming and responded with AltaVista etc etc. In every case DEC saw technology and change and made great products in response.
What they didn't do was really commit to those products.
For DEC it was all about VMS. Especially on VAX and later on Alph
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That's been a piece of revisionist history, propagated by Google itself during the mid '00s, as a branding tactic. Google was a mere geek's toy during its first couple of years.
People started switching because the other search engines were full of spam, porn, and advertisements, and along came Google with its PageRank algorithm, which proved very effective at the time.
People suffered through all other search engines' "portals" for years and would not have switched if the only thing Google had to offer was
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It's already gone- altavista.digital.com doesn't open!
Re:AltaVista (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:AltaVista (Score:5, Insightful)
Heh... Yeah...
Back when I was still using altavista, I heard something about a search engine called "google" here on slashdot. People seemed to like it, but I couldn't figure out why. Lots of people raved about how cool their "simple" page was, but I didn't think that was a big deal. Tried google once in the beginning, wasn't impressed with the search results, and kept going with altavista.
Was probably a little over a year later I was looking for something, altavista wasn't finding it, so out of desperation I figured I'd give this "google" thing a try. The exact thing I was looking for was the first result. Never used altavista again.
By the way. I never did buy into that whole "Don't be evil" crap. I wasn't born yesterday.
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Re:AltaVista (Score:5, Informative)
What really got me in to Google was how light their search page was. It had one, small graphic, and the rest was just a precise bit of HTML. In those days, the best I could do was a 26.4Kbps dial-up connection, which made Google an outstanding choice over Yahoo! and Dogpile, which had been frustrating me with all the crap that was necessary to load before the page was useful. It really made a huge difference, and I'm thinking that's more significantly responsible for their initial success than even the quality of their search results.
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pretty much mirrors my experience... used alltheweb.com (fast.no) for a while too.
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Hmm, that's eerily identical to how I started using Google.
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Don't worry gramps. Hotbot [hotbot.com] is still going strong.
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I mostly remember AltaVista because for many years (before Google Translate showed up) the AltaVista translator was the best and easiest way to translate foreign language text into English.
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Can't necessarily say I''m "sad" to see them go, but it does raise a little ping of nostalgia.....
FTFY.
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Granted, that was back when "www.hp.com" was an invalid URL and you had to use "www.hp.boise.com" to get a printer driver, but still....
Was that also back in the day when the search engine was altavista.digital.com?
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When you say, "back in the day," when exactly do you mean? AltaVista was indeed a great service in the mid-to-late 1990s, until it succumbed to spam, porn, and advertisement corruption, like the rest of them.
dZ.
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My first favorite well after using Gopher, Archie, and such
but when web got popular
was Webcrawler and Lycos I occasionally used AltaVista
but Webcrawler was the fastest simplest design... I swear google stole the minimalist design from Webcrawler...All Webcrawler had was a logo and the search bar that was it, no news, no ads, nothing.
it was awesome
Re:AltaVista (Score:4, Funny)
I've heard Larry Page eats babies and drinks the blood of castrated goats. It must be true because Google lies so much.
Re:AltaVista (Score:4, Funny)
Actually, that is true. I found it through one of the expert guides at The Mining Company.
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It does. AltaVista ROCKED in its day. Of course the same could be said about Wordperfect and Lotus 123 too, but who remembers those anymore.
Alas, I knew them all so well. I even remember Wordstar and Visicalc. I must be old.
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What do you mean gopher is not working?
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Re:bad link, evil link (Score:5, Insightful)
link works fine, you are just infected with the McAfee Virus
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He keeps it around for the free bath salts.
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actually..it is.. sadly enough.
http://www.adobe.com/products/coldfusion-family.html [adobe.com]
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the service is still up? (former webtv user from 99 to 02). Older webtv accounts are .net...the .com came a bit later.
I liked how it handled USENET. It does IRC too, though WebTV users can only be in one channel at a time and can't use advanced commands directly.
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Yes but AltaVista just prior to google was an interesting search engine. Type in your query, wait for the results and then immediately skip to page 3 completely ignoring the first two pages, quick preview of page 3 and the skip to page 5 sometimes even page 7 before the results you were looking for actually started to showed up, MSN search was just as bad (part of the reason for the $ in M$).
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Or I need to make a beer run.
-Some old guy.
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They did precisely that in 2003 or 2004, after the acquisition. If you didn't notice the loss of functionality, you were using it wrong.