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Comment by tptacek | Hacker News Reader

Was it ever good?

None of the search engines from that era were really good. AltaVista was perhaps the best, but AskJeeves was up there and people used multiple. AltaVista, AskJeeves, Yahoo, etc. They all had their pros and cons.

Then Google arrived and showed them what a “good” search engine was like.

And at the time it was still an open question whether search engines or curated oracles like Yahoo would be what stuck in the long term.

Exactly. Before google came out in I think 1998, I had several bookmarked sites like excite.com, altavista, dogpile, yahoo, and yes askjeeves. You kinda had a feeling for which one would be good for which kind of search. But then google came along...

I remember AltaVista being the only really credible search engine prior to Google (I took a brief detour to Excite but kept going back to AltaVista). Jeeves I only remember for the freeform query gimmick.

Around this time you also had meta search engines, which gave you the dedup'd results of all the major search engines at the time. There was MetaCrawler and Dogpile from what I remember, both of which are oddly still around.

Altavista was fantastic and represented a features and usability high water mark that was never passed by google.

Full boolean operator search with "literals" actually respected, negative search terms worked as advertised, etc.

None of that ever worked properly, consistently, at google.

I would think that 90% of the principals at DEC/Compaq WRL working on AltaVista would have moved to google, their first office was nearby in downtown Palo Alto back in 1999.

I used to read through search engine patents back in 2006-7 when I was an SEO consultant. I could see the same names from the AltaVista patents later start appearing as authors on the Google patents.

Agreed. AltaVista was the best of the pre-Google search engines. I seem to remember Google having negative terms, literals and booleans (at least or/and) - although they weren't well documented, they worked. Amazon had literals and negative terms too for many years. Now searching on both of those sites is "search theater", where they pretend to give targeted results while burying the result you're looking for just deep enough to maximize page views before too many users bounce.

I fucking hate we now live in a world where leading companies A/B test precisely how much they can degrade their core product value and annoy users knowing they're safe from competitors because startups know if they threaten Google/Amazon on that stuff they'll just put back the minimum functionality long enough to ensure the new player dies.

I pay for kagi on my personal machine, it is always a delight when my cmd-t search is answered kagi and not a list of ads ...

Google did for a long time have a page documenting those features.

Picked a random date from around the time I know they had that. Clicked Adcanced Search, then a link near the top of the page to Advanced Search Tips.

https://web.archive.org/web/20041017053307/http://www.google...

> None of that ever worked properly, consistently, at google.

My experience is it worked pretty well on Google for a while, but then it got progressively worse.

Right, for this first 5 years or so, it worked. But then they started to optimize for “the masses”, and they don’t use boolean logic in queries.

They optimized for ad impressions. There was no technical reason not to keep around a Boolean mode - some competitors effectively exist because of that single feature.

It worked pretty well on early google and altavista. Find an archive of searchlores.org from that era and see for yourself. +Fravia had documented and tested the features quite thoroughly

It is absolutely insane to say that Altavista was better than Google though.

Try Kagi, it implements them quite well.

I think they also allowed distance between words (within x) to increase relevance.

The "near" operator was gold.

i don't know precisely the architectures they both used (i tend not to study things that are changing and over which i have no control), but here's what I would say:

I like boolean and literalism etc., I like control and syntactic precision, and I did not prefer google when it first got traction and buzz, but within six months of that, google's "page ranked" back-end database was clearly superior to what altavista's front-end queries could do with their own back end data.

it shocked me when people I thought I knew well would say "I always hit google's "I feel lucky" to go straight to the top search result. Me, I prefer to pore through results looking for nuance and to fine tune my query. google was giving me much better results to look at, even if I had less control for fine tuning. Google has relentlessly over time diminished literalism in queries in favor of mass market popularity. As an overly simplistic example, when I look up Thor, I am never interested in any film or who was in it, and that's pretty much all you get now. Alexander the Great is an incredible figure from history, shaping the geo landscape in ways that still affect us today, but searchwise he's just a fictionalized portrayal by a celebrity who don't even have his own authenticity.

You might want to search for "alexander the great" again, and also, maybe use "Alexander IV" or "Alexander of Macedon". I'm an amateur Classicist I look up ancient figures all that time, obscure and well known to check wikipedia on things, and I've never seen it prioritize that film above the figure, though perhaps it did when that movie was recent. Pity about Thor and the MCU, though.

Altavista was like the 'free' version of what some libraries had for via paid search subscriptions.

At the time where search was a tool that you had to you know.. come up with various terms (remember Google Whacks) and find results about it.

RIP Altavista

Seconded

Google took a different approach to web search

For me AltaVista was superior. It seemed that people who were not particularky good at searching prefered Google

Perhaps this explains its popularity

AltaVista had a Java applet that would visualize the "clusters" that a search produced. You could then click on a "cluster" in order to exclude all the irrelevant ones and the search results would update.

For example: Searching on "python" would give you two obvious clusters one for "reptiles" and one for "programming languages". Clicking on the appropriate cluster would screen out all the irrelevant ones.

This is a feature still unmatched by any search engine today.

I've never seen this feature despite using a lot altavista back then. What a pity

And now every search engine has been flooded with SEO’d AI slop and they all suck again.

Alta Vista had more relevant search results than Google has now.

For all practical purposes, internet search is dead or dying. It has been enshittified to perfection by multiple parties. Those who could have been called users in a previous life are the ones getting the least use out of it. For a brief period of time, LLMs can help. Until their inevitable decay into ad-infested hellscapes makes them just as useless. They don't have ad blockers.

You hear analysts talk about the majority of corporations being in the infancy of their understanding of language models. Shudder to think of the slop mature players will put out.

Don't forget WebCrawler!

AltaVista and HotBot for me. Yahoo wasn't a search engine, it was a manually curated website directory (with a hierarchical structure), which was great for finding similar websites if you found one you liked.

You could get search results on yahoo. The directory results would come first and then search results from their current “partner.” At one point it was Inktomi, the Berkeley company behind HotBot. At one point it was Google. Before them, one of the more generic ones.

originally it was directory only, wasn’t until fairly late they adddd an alta vista fallback.

If you define the mid 90s as “late,” sure. I’d argue the very phrase “Alta vista fallback” kind of screams “early,” at least in overall internet time.

I remember vividly how lycos was much better than google

Yahoo was pretty good until they removed comments from their posts as well as removing Yahoo Answers.

I loved the chaos of Yahoo answers.

I remember messed up questions like “Can humans get preggo from midgets” and things of that nature.

Gregnant?

Pregante!

Nobody remembers Hotbot. Google before Google.

I remember. Powered by Inktomi.

I cannot read AltaVista without thinking of Astalavista[.box.sk].

Mee to :D

Yeah I remember using it back in the day and getting good results.

> Unlike early keyword-based engines, it aimed to answer specific questions, acting as a precursor to modern AI assistants like Siri or ChatGPT.

> Ask Jeeves (now Ask.com) was an early search engine launched in 1996 that allowed users to get answers via natural language queries, personified by a cartoon butler mascot. Developed by Garrett Gruener and David Warthen, it focused on Q&A rather than just keywords.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ask.com

No not at all.

The whole point of AskJeeves was that you could ask Jeeves things in natural language because the landing page was a snappily dressed butler waiting to help you around the internet, but it didn’t really work so you were left disappointed every time. Still found myself using it because the url was easy to remember though. But then google annihilated it so nobody ever went back, and I guess why they dropped the Jeeves part of the url because he was less than useful.

Yes. When it came out it was amazing, and it forced the existing search engines to start parsing queries' intents rather than just searching for the words in them.

I very vaguely recall using it right before I started using google. very early 2000s. it was ok.

During those days you were switching between 3-4 different ones to find info. They were maybe good for two weeks where I would use it alot but you always switched around and came back to it.

ask was cool because the appeal initially was to allow people to better form search queries with natural human language questions.

as far as weird search engine traits I still think ChaCha is king; it's just sort of intrinsically funny that another human being is being given two cents to find me the most relevant FarScape fansite or DIY tattoo ink guides, whatever.

WAS being given

They’re done.

It was my default search engine for my formative years of computer use in the mid-2000s. Google was starting to get better at finding results with matching topics, rather than matching keywords. But it wasn't really there yet, and you'd get some really dumb results sometimes. I found ask.com to be much more predictable.

I was trying to explain to my grandmother (born in 1923) what the Internet was. So I pulled up Ask Jeeves and typed in, "What's the weather in [grandmother's hometown, population 4000]. And the precise current forecast came up. That was in 1997.

I think that and dogpile were the best in that short area before google took off as the clear winner.

No. It never worked as advertised, was never as good as the competition and only really had any success because of the quirky theme.

Back when being taught how to use the internet in schools was still a thing, I would see vestigial references to Ask Jeeves included as an alternative to Google that “let you use natural sentences”. With a 0% success rate every time I tried.

Between ‘97-2000, arguably.

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