Why did Alta Vista fail?

[Bird222]

It used to be the big search engine. What happened?

 

[HamburgerBoy]

Was it now? After a traumatizing event involving AskJeeves, AltaVista was my dedicated porn search browser, but that lasted only briefly. I seem to remember that they had a video search function earlier than most, on a whole, I don't remember much noteworthy about them.

 

[shortylickens]

Because you dont touch yourself at night.

 

[poofyhairguy]

Because you dont touch yourself at night.

 

[Miramonti]

I suspect there is an interesting story somewhere behind why they failed. They were at the top of the pack, but didn't adapt and monetize as needed to stay competitive.

 

[FelixDeCat]

Goog was simple, with no ads on the homepage. It was just a tool.

Now of course its a huge monster.

 

[tynopik]

google produced higher quality search results

but the biggest difference to me was that google showed the immediate context of where the words were found

altavista just showed you the top lines of the page, so you couldn't tell how relevant the hits were

also altavista.digital.com was a bit long and the alt url (av.com?) wasn't well known

 

[mmntech]

They got bought out by Yahoo 11 years ago. Apparently they still kept the site going until about a year ago.

 

[teejee]

With Altavista you had to browse 10 pages of search results before finding the relevant page. Then Google came and gave you the relevant page first on the first page.

 

[Shlong]

A better product came along is what happened. I used to use Altavista, Webcrawler and occasionally Yahoo. Tried out Google and after getting superior results, never looked back.

 

[GagHalfrunt]

google produced higher quality search results

That. AltaVista was big in the time when all search engines sucked and they sucked just a tiny bit less than most. Google came along and did searches well, so AltaVista died. The better search engine won.

 

[SagaLore]

It didn't fail, it was quite successful. For a very long time they were an engine/index for many other search engines, you just didn't realize it.

 

[gorcorps]

I didn't realize they ever succeeded

 

[Eli]

I don't know the story behind it; I agree it would probably quite interesting. But I used them extensively back in the day as well.

I don't remember when or how the transition to Google happened, it just... did. I think it's similar overall to the transition from MySpace to Facebook. It just kinda happens. Wonder if anyone has ever studied the phenomenon? I bet Facebook and Google have.....

The thought of "something else" coming along must be terrifying to them. It will happen. I can imagine Google being around for a long time to come, but Facebook's days are likely numbered unless they really play their cards right.

 

[BladeVenom]

Google was just a lot better.

What I miss is Deja News. Google bought it and ruined it by making it part of their abomination known as Google Groups.

 

[pmv]

I thought Google were simply the first to realise it made sense to order results depending on how widely the pages were linked to (much like valuing papers based on how often they are cited)? Hence they gave more useful results?

Is that not true?

(Though even if it is true, why didn't the others just copy the idea? Surely it's not patentable, give how scientists have been using that sort of system for decades?)

 

[marvdmartian]

They got google-ized, is all. :hmm:

My favorite, before Google came along, was HotBot. Always seemed to be able to find more pertinent results with them. Then they were bought out by Lycos, who destroyed them.

 

[Bird222]

Google was just a lot better.

What I miss is Deja News. Google bought it and ruined it by making it part of their abomination known as Google Groups.

Oh yeah good old deja news. I think my deja email address still works as a login for google groups.

 

[mmntech]

Yahoo was the king of search engines before Google came along and conquered the web. I do remember using Web Crawler and AltaVista a lot though. Their biggest feature I think was BableFish. Was one of the earliest free text translation apps that I can remember.

I actually don't remember when everyone started to transition from Yahoo to Google. Would have been very early 2000s. They had a better search algorithm than Yahoo did.

I do remember sitting in middle school and them trying to teach us proper web search technique by using brackets, wildcards, etc. All that stuff is a lost art now. We even used to make "sites" using Hyper Card.

 

[Printer Bandit]

http://altavista.com

 

[bryanl]

Altavista is still the #1 search engine in Pawnee, Indiana.

 

[olds]

I miss Netscape.

 

[Printer Bandit]

i miss AllAdvantage.

 

[Mixolydian]

Whatever happened to Excite?

 

[olds]

Whatever happened to Excite?

http://www.excite.com/