I'm betting more on the successors to this initial group of AI companies. The ones that have to build actual profitable businesses.
Most of us were using 56k modems to access the internet back then, Google's search returned results within a couple of seconds. Yahoo, Lycos, Excite, Alta-Vista were still loading. Then the search results themselves were so good you could often just pick the first result. They eventually added a button which just took you directly to the first result. Which I used.
Your memory is faulty. AltaVista was always super fast--it never had the advertising bloat that the other ones had until the very end.
The problem AltaVista had was that it didn't scale when the Internet went exponential--so AltaVista would give you good search results until you asked current, topical questions. AltaVista relied on running a single, super-expensive stonking huge Alpha machine while Google ran on lots of commodity servers that spidered constantly.
See https://www.usenix.org/legacy/publications/library/proceedin... for the 1997 server count, which was before we got to the three tier architecture.
We also spidered constantly. A couple of those huge backend Alphas were dedicated to holding the constant spider index. AV had a well earned reputation for quick discovery, although I think Google wound up faster. We suffered a bit from maintaining separate indexes for the main corpus and recent pages, and I imagine Google handled that better.
But the period of time when our main index went to hell was the period of time when we failed to do a new main index crawl for several months. I won’t get into why that happened politically because my memory isn’t perfect and I don’t want to criticize anyone who won’t see this to stand up for themselves, but it’s absolutely the case that we let the index get stale.
And I will say that I think the execs were distracted by the idea of challenging Yahoo by buying a shopping site and a local news site of sorts and, unlike the Google of the time, they lacked the wisdom to focus on our primary product.
And now I fade back into the hedges, until the next time AV comes up… I suspect a high percentage of my HN comments are on this exact topic. It makes me sad.
And I still miss the AltaVista illustrated diagram (Java Applet) that would allow you to drill down and specialize the search results. No modern search has ever matched that, again.
> It was a fun place to be.
It was. I was in the hardware side during the Hostile Giveaway(tm) to Intel and Compaq.
Good luck with your cat.
Perhaps we could nerd snipe Marginalia Search to add it :)
Following your comments and trying to trail things out, the only thing I can find is a reference to AltaVista LiveTopics.
https://dannysullivan.com/why-search-sucks-you-wont-fix-it-t...
I suspect what I used was that "GRAPH" button in the AltaVista Refine picture.
We might want to archive that image. It seems like the only evidence that this stuff ever existed.
https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Alta-Vista-LiveTopic-Gra...
which has some different coverage.
I did try to archive the blog you linked but unfortunately the owner is blocking it with robots.txt
User-agent: ia_archiver Disallow: /
I suspect it was a later incarnation that I used.
We were big AV users initially, I think for 2 years? This was 94-97 so my memory of the time periods is fuzzy. When Google came along I have very vivid memory of it providing not only better search results but also faster loads times.
I wonder if Google was already geo-distributed at the time? Latency was real then, it wasn't uncommon to hit 350ms (compared to 20-50ms to Europe) and the difference would have been felt back then. It was a killer for Counter Strike.
I was a relatively early investor (2008), but I was very hesitant early on because Microsoft was building an integrated search function, which became Windows Live Search, which became Bing. I definitely remember it took me to the beginning of the financial crisis to finally decide that it was going nowhere. I suspect it was the development of Google Maps that changed my mind.
Without those prescient and lucky acquisitions, we'd be talking about a "Google" that looked much more like Yahoo.
It wasn't search proficiency that built the empire, it was leveraging a transient search quality advantage into cash flow, then plowing that cash into acquisitions to construct a durable moat.
That didn't happen because they were magically amazing at search forever.
It happened because Google had a good business plan and could afford to throw gobs of money at engineers and infrastructure, in quantities that even Microsoft was unwilling to match.
Simple text ads to start. It was built on MySQL, Java and C++ and became how they made most of their money.