Broadband Tech > General Questions > Why Did Alta Vista Search Engine Lose To Google?

Why Did Alta Vista Search Engine Lose To Google?

Meanwhile, it became clear that AltaVista's portal strategy was unsuccessful, and the search service began losing market share, especially to Google.

»en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alta_Vista

They were sold so many times, it was never solid.
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My Blog 2.0

reply to Xstar_Lumini
Harder to type than google.

reply to Xstar_Lumini
I do not remember Altavista ever being that popular among the masses. From what I can recall, it's main claim was that it searched the most number of websites. Now, whether their results that came from user queries were any better than others is debatable.

Yahoo is probably the site whose search should have been doing better today. Lots of people used their portal back in those days. I think people switched to Google initially because its interface was relatively clean. Other sites had so many ads that people thought Google was some sort of savior whose results were not sponsored. Funny thing is that Google now is unstoppable in internet advertising as almost every page out there has some sort of Google ads.

reply to Xstar_Lumini
I do remember when Alta Vista was the mac daddy. But not sure that they quite had the same interface and colors of google. If I recall correctly, main difference was that google gave you a result more quickly, and due to the fact that it was mostly text (especially in the beginning) the pages would load up super fast, even with dial up. I also recall that google had a lot less ads in their searches, so you would actually find the info that you really needed more reliably than alta vista.
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Attention Humans; we be your pictures, release us!

reply to btB
I have never understood the Google thing - just like i(Apple). I have always used Yahoo and rarely in a year do I go to Google and get different results.
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Brian

"It drops into your stomach like a Abrams's tank.... driven by Rosanne Barr..." A. Bourdain

reply to Xstar_Lumini
It's simple. Google actually returned exactly what you were looking for in the first or second link when you searched. All of the other search engines would return millions of hits that weren't what you were looking for at all. You had to wade through multiple pages to get what you were looking for OR you had to use query parameters to find what you wanted. Most people didn't know how to use the search engine's search parameters I bet.

I don't think Alta Vista was ever any where near as accurate as Google. I still remember when I found Google. It was like an internet epiphany for me. I was literally astounded that Google would provide exactly what I was looking for on the first return page every time, and most times the first or second link was exactly what I wanted. I said goodbye to Dogpile and everyone else and have had Google as my homepage ever since.

reply to beck

reply to Xstar_Lumini
I was a relative 'latecomer' to Google...

I was an AltaVista user back when its URL was »altavista.digital.com (hey, remember DEC?)

I liked the old AltaVista... a lot. It kicked Yahoo's ass way-back-when. And the fact that it ran on AlphaServer? Even better from a coolness point of view.

Then Google happened. It was AltaVista, without all the crapification that came along later.

reply to 45071419

reply to Xstar_Lumini
Even before AltaVista, HotBot, and so forth, there was Inference Find, later called IFind.

»www.encyclopedia.com/doc/1G1-19738060.html

As Rudyard Kipling wrote:

Far-called, our navies melt away;
On dune and headland sinks the fire:
Lo, all our pomp of yesterday
Is one with Nineveh and Tyre!
Judge of the Nations, spare us yet.
Lest we forget—lest we forget!

reply to Xstar_Lumini
{Old man diatribe}

Back in my day, there was:

Webcrawler, AOL's bread and butter
Alta Vista
Lycos
Infoseek
Excite
Yahoo
Hotbot (Now THIS was a search engine)
Metacrawler
MSN Search

Of them all, I found Yahoo to be the worst of the bunch. Hotbot was awesome, because it gave you search results from all of the search engines in one interface. Metacrawler was useless, WebCrawler was useless. Lycos didn't return enough, Excite was cluttered, and Infoseek...well, no comment.

AltaVista was the top to me. It just felt like the king of the mountain. I used AltaVista's Babelfish all the time in particular. Really sorry to see them go.

What drew me to Google wasn't the accuracy of the results even though that was a big point. It was the simplicity of the interface. At first I never felt like they were trying to sell me anything, and at the time banner ads and popups/popunders/popovers/flashing strobes were the big thing going, and the search engines had tons of banners. Google had nothing but text ads, which never bothered me. In fact I was more inclined to click a text ad about a product than a banner ad.

Then the mail came out, offering 1GB of memory which at the time was unheard of - compared to Yahoo and Hotmail's piddly 10MB - and I've been a fan of Google ever since. I do think they're biting off more than they can chew, but I refuse to search with anything but Google.

reply to btB

reply to ReVeLaTeD

reply to beck

reply to Xstar_Lumini
I have been using the www since 1997. Google simply gave me more relevant results. I started using Google full time in 2001.

Prior to that I was using Altavista. Among my friends who had internet access, most of them used Yahoo! which (I think) used Altavista at one time.

reply to Xstar_Lumini
I used to use AV for web searches and I used Deja for Usenet searches.. After Google bought out Deja, I started using them for Usenet searches -- and discovered, quite by accident, that their web searches returned much more relevant results than what I was getting with AV. The rest is history, I guess.

reply to Xstar_Lumini
bought my first computer (Atari 400) back in 1983. Began using original IBM PCs at junior college in 1985 so I've been around for a while.

Yahoo's problems has always been slow speed. Slow, slow, slow. Excite used to be one of my favorites until they were sold and their service suffered. As mentioned, I could rarely remembers Alta Vista's name/URL and I rarely, if ever used it. Today, I am solidly a Google fan primarily because it's much faster and has a cleaner layout than other search engines.

I still really like Yahoo and have had an email address with them for years and years but they are still slow as molasses most of the time.

reply to Xstar_Lumini
Alta Vista began as a demo for Digital to show how powerful its Alpha computers were. It was a leader in the field. But as with many Digital innovations, Digital never managed to convert this into sustainable market success. And to Digital, this demo project wasn't important enough to warrant paying the big bucks for the altavista.com domain.

And at that time, Digital was on a path of self destruction and the last CEO was busy negotiating with Compaq what Digital should have left by the time Compaq would make its official takeover offer. Palmer found a buyer for Alta Vista: Yahoo who already had their own search engine.

Alta Vista ran on Alphas with Digital Unix. (which became Tru64 under Compaq and which was killed by HP).