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

said by goddess2010:

Harder to type than google.

Sounds stupid, but entirely true. More difficult to remember, and less catchy.

..exactly! Everyone knows how hard it was and for google it has been easy enough. It became clear that AltaVista's portal strategy was unsuccessful..

said by Doctor Olds:

That makes sense, why bother bookmarking sites that you use, just type them out every time? I never said anything about portals or general sites or home pages.

said by printscreen:

For some places with short easy to remember domain names it is actually faster to type the domain name without any prefix or suffix and then hit Ctrl-Enter to get the www and .com parts added by the browser (works in IE, Firefox and Opera). For many sites like Google, Facebook, American Airlines and a local newspaper I do it that way. Typing "google" or "facebook" or "aa" or any other short domain name and then Ctrl-Enter beats the heck out of having to go to the favorites menu and then hunt for it.

said by printscreen:

At the beginning God said.. there let be Yahoo

said by printscreen:

For some places with short easy to remember domain names it is actually faster to type the domain name without any prefix or suffix and then hit Ctrl-Enter to get the www and .com parts added by the browser (works in IE, Firefox and Opera). For many sites like Google, Facebook, American Airlines and a local newspaper I do it that way. Typing "google" or "facebook" or "aa" or any other short domain name and then Ctrl-Enter beats the heck out of having to go to the favorites menu and then hunt for it.

said by Doctor Olds:

Hated the interface + lacking results is the entire issue many had with it, it was just too much and/or too busy. It looked like someone threw up on the screen.

Here is a Image Time-Line that may bring back memories or horrors.

Images: Yahoo's steady home page transformation
»news.cnet.com/2300-1032_3-607280···ubj=news

said by Xstar_Lumini:

Can somebody answer this enigma for me?

said by CylonRed:

Easy to see at the top of the page - right in front of the eyes with words in yeillow - now it is just nothing more than you ignoring the obvious just to make an argument...

I focus on what I want - not what the rest of the page has - not difficult to do but apparently becoming a lost art - probably the same rteason marketing doe snot work on me as well.

said by ReVeLaTeD:

{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.

said by atuarre:

You forgot Magellan. It was a back in the day one also.