Old'aVista, a Guide to the Old Internet | Hacker News Reader

Old'aVista, a Guide to the Old Internet

oldavista.com

43 pointsCharlesW12 comments

The thing I miss most from Altavista is the NEAR search keyword. If you remembered that a page contained two (or more) particular words in a sentence, but not the exact phrase, you could search for foo NEAR bar (or foo ~ bar), and it would return results where "foo" and "bar" occurred within 10 words of each other.

I think google had something like that for a while, but it never worked as well for me as Altavista's implementation.

This is scraping internetarchive (for keywords? not sure how categories are made), how did altavista add sites? Did you ask them to add yours? Were they scraping something?

My friend never used the internet pre-google and I was trying to explain how searches work and I only remember #aoltags, prodigy or mindspring or some other service (that had everquest/meridian59/that dragon game?) and I couldn't remember what the results of using alta/dogpile/etc looked like.

I just looked up meridian 59 and they put the music on spotify

June 25, 2022 The Meridian 59 soundtrack is now available on Spotify and Amazon Music! https://open.spotify.com/artist/0lGsRspRVt5SFMUa60bkWH?si=53...

> how did altavista add sites? Did you ask them to add yours? Were they scraping something?

Yes and yes — they had a web crawler*, and you could also submit sites.

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AltaVista#:~:text=At%20launch%....

Am I the only person here who remembers when AltaVista implemented their Raging Search lean search engine after cluttering themselves with the usual “web portal” riffraff of the late nineties?

I was using www.raging.com (or was .org or .net) until I switched to Google sometime in 2000 or 2001. I remember it was sometime in summer, June or thereabouts, but I don’t remember the year. How weird.

Lovely to see the AltaVista design again.

For those who don’t know what I’m talking about:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/AltaVista

It was a showcase for Digital's high-end Alphaservers.

"The Hardware Behind AltaVista

AltaVista: AlphaStation 500, 256 MB memory, 6GB disk. AlphaStation 500's handle all external traffic to the site. They run a custom multi-threaded Web server which sends queries to the Web indexer and News indexer.

Web Indexer: AlphaServer 8400 5/300, 10 processors, 6 GB memory, 210 GB RAID disk. This model is the most powerful computer built by Digital. These servers run the query engine. The Web index is larger than 40 GB, but most requests take less than a second.

Scooter: AlphaServer 4100 5/300, 1.5 GB memory, 30 GB RAID disk. The super-spider runs from this machine. It fetches pages from the Web and sends them to Vista, our primary web indexer.

Vista: AlphaServer 4100 5/300, 2 processors, 2GB memory, 180GB RAID disk. This machine indexes Scooter output and serves as a central distribution point for new index data.

News Indexer: AlphaServer 600 5/333, 896MB memory, 13 GB disk. This machine keeps an up-to-date index of the news spool: since new articles appear and old articles expire all the time, it is in fact quite busy, even though the index it serves is much smaller than the Web index.

News Server: AlphaServer 600 5/333, 896MB memory, 24 GB RAID disks. It maintains a current news spool for the News Indexer. It also serves the articles via http to those of you who don't want to know about news servers but want to read news. "[0]

[0] https://groups.google.com/g/comp.unix.tru64/c/aB_z5YXwNMI

'Tru64' would likely date this as being after Altavista's hayday, when it'd still have been called 'DEC Unix', or more usually 'OSF/1' if you were differentiating from Ultrix.

Probably. I don't remember when Altavista's "heyday" was.

Tru64 was after Compaq bought DEC in 98.

96-98 really, google rapidly ate their lunch after launching in the back end of '98.

I'll grant I remember still occasionally using altavista in 99, but google had very much become my primary search by then, and the same was true for pretty much everyone I knew.

I have a vague recollection of compaq closing it down shortly after buying it, then reopening it after some outcry - coinciding with it changing URLs from being the subdomain off digital.com.

Of course, Lycos, inktomi and others were all vying for attention around then too.

A comment on another post linked to oldweb.today, and the first thing I tried visiting was Altavista. I loved Altavista so much, and I want to believe that the fact Altavista inspired Oldavista means there are more people who did.

Should it be notable that one of the most searched words on the “old internet” is OxyContin, the gateway drug to the opioid epidemic?

Link to Netscape is broken.

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