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Comment by rippercushions | Hacker News Reader

Uhh, no, Altavista was the dominant player before Google and it had plenty of competition. Google's key innovations were leveraging PageRank to extract signal from what other webpages were saying, instead of relying on naive keyword search etc, and then figuring out a way to monetize search with targeted keyword ads when Yahoo and co were stuck with banner impressions.

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Yep, Altavista was the one to use before Google. I'm not sure the search results were that much better to be honest when they launched, although they were good.

Call me shallow, but I liked the simple, distraction free landing page and the "feeling lucky" button.

What on good earth are you talking about ? Google results upon launch were miles ahead of anything else at the time. I personally Googled once and never went back.

You are probably right, I honestly can't remember. I do remember really liking the uncluttered page though!

At the time many technical users were using programs that could search multiple diffrent engines to desperately try and improve the results. On home connections these programs also needed to notify you when the results were done. Google results were miles ahead of everything found accross all the engines whilst being nearly as fast as you could type.

Google was better if you were searching for something popular, because it showed highly linked-to pages for that query. AltaVisa was perfectly good if you were searching for something specific that would only have a few pages mentioning it. It was great for function names, error messages, names of professors, etc. So different people had different experiences.

Agree with the sibling: the first time I used Google, it felt like magic. I ended up not even caring about what I was searching for; I just started throwing queries at it and marveling at how great the results were.

Altavista was certainly better than what came before, but you had to get your query just right in order to find what you wanted. And if you couldn't find the right words for the query, you were sunk. With Google, you could get ok-ish results with a sub-standard query, and the ok-ish results would often help you figure out a better query.

I remember using dogpile [1] (which was a search engine aggregator) - the results from google were consistently better than altavista, so over time I gravitated directly to google for results. These days I'm on Kagi...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dogpile

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