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Comment by thought_alarm | Hacker News Reader

The first time I tried Google I did a search for "foo bar" and it returned web pages that only contained the phrase "foo bar", and I promptly deleted my Alta Vista bookmark. What's funny is that I remember it so vividly, like how someone would remember where they were the day Kennedy was shot.

It would be really great if Alta Vista kept their old search engine and search index circa 1999 on-line, so we could periodically remind ourselves what the web used to be like.

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I just remember being struck by how fast Google was. I literally couldn't believe it was possible to search an index that size in less time than it took to load most static pages.

I still have trouble believing it, and I have a pretty good understanding how it works.

But in Altavista, you could have searched on foo bar, "foo bar", or foo NEAR bar; I still wish Google had the latter option.

This feature is similar: http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=%22google+****+barc... One star will fill in any number of words. If you use two or more stars, the number of stars is the number of words Google will fill in.

I think it does!

You probably know that an asterisk stands in for a single word in a query, but if you add more asterisks then it stands in for more words. However, there's not a one-to-one correspondence between asterisks and words skipped. A "few" asterisks means skip a "few" words, and more asterisks means the words can be farther apart. So you can search for foo NEAR bar with something like foo * bar.

At least, that was my understanding, but I can't seem to find that spelled out anywhere online after a quick search just now, so I could be way off.

I remember vividly when I first learned about Google, too. In the New Yorker, of all places. But then I was a lit grad student at the time and thinking a lot about ways to optimize research. And I was similarly underwhelmed by the competency of existing search engines (anybody remember Northern Lights?)

As a matter fact (5 minutes of tortuous Google search later...), here the article is:

http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2000/05/29/2000_05_29_088_T...

A neat little time capsule.

Bummer, I was just about to point you to the Google page of their index from 2001, but it looks like they took it down - http://www.google.com/search2001.html

And, sadly:

www.archive.org:

>0 pages found for http://google.com/search2001.html

>Sorry, no matches.

I was searching for an OCX control that was missing, and after 15 minutes on yahoo and no useful download pages, someone suggested Google, which I had never heard of before.

I search, first result, OCX download. Never used anything since.

I remember Hot Bot used to have this feature. I switched to Google, though, once Hot Bot's front page stopped being the search page.

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