altavista

[captainQwark]

the search engine Google gets endorsed pretty often on the boards, but I have a preference for Altavista. Is there anyone else here who likes Altavista?

[Violet]

Originally posted by captainQwark
the search engine Google gets endorsed pretty often on the boards, but I have a preference for Altavista. Is there anyone else here who likes Altavista?
I used to use that, as well as Dogpile. But now Google is used most.

[TheLoadedDog]

I used it when I first went online all those years ago. It's not bad. Google is faster though.

Altavista can be good if you're using fussy search criteria, but 99% of the time I prefer Google.

[Colophon]

Is there anyone else here who likes Altavista?
Yeah, in about, like, 1996. :rolleyes:

[Lobsang]

Many years ago a magazine review said altavista was the best. I used it for many years, until a few comparative searches showed me that google was better.

[AHunter3]

I use AltaVista first and go to Google or AllTheWeb.com if I get zero hits in AltaVista. Google has a very impressive number of indexed sites to search (significantly more than Alta Vista) but doesn't support boolean searches so I hate to use it (like trying to write a letter with a crayon).

AllTheWeb.com is rising in my estimation but it has some odd bugs in how it parses boolean strings.

In most cases the problem is not "I can't get any hits" but rather "I get too many hits most of which aren't what I'm looking for", so Alta Vista lets me get the right results more effectively.

[Lute Skywatcher]

Originally posted by AHunter3
Google has a very impressive number of indexed sites to search (significantly more than Alta Vista) but doesn't support boolean searches so I hate to use it (like trying to write a letter with a crayon). It doesn't (http://www.google.com/advanced_search?hl=en)?

[mouthbreather]

I preferred Altavista when Yahoo was all the rage. Since Google's rise to fame I have not been back to Altavista except to use Babelfish.

[AHunter3]

Correct, Jeff Olsen, it doesn't. That page doesn't provide boolean searching capabilities.

Go try to perform this search on Google:

("hitchhiker" or "hitchhiking") and "last" and ("title" or "book" or "paperback") and not ("Adams" or "Galaxy") and ("sleuth" or "detective") and not "Milat"

or this (http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?postid=3940195&highlight=altavista+or+boolean+or+alta+vista#post3940195) one:

("polyphenol" and "cruinthne") or ("coacervate" and "noetherian") or ("angiotensin" and "ray davies")

[Mr2001]

Originally posted by AHunter3
Go try to perform this search on Google:

("hitchhiker" or "hitchhiking") and "last" and ("title" or "book" or "paperback") and not ("Adams" or "Galaxy") and ("sleuth" or "detective") and not "Milat"
hitchhiker OR hitchhiking last title OR book OR paperback -adams -galaxy sleuth OR detective -milat

Google ignored "-milat" because the searches are limited to 10 terms, but it found the book Last Bus to Woodstock.

[Lute Skywatcher]

Originally posted by AHunter3
("polyphenol" and "cruinthne") or ("coacervate" and "noetherian") or ("angiotensin" and "ray davies") Evidently, you haven't tried that search in a while.

[Lsura]

I use boolean operators on google most of the time I use it - but only on the main search page. The one thing you have to do with it is make sure the operators are in all caps - if you use "or" it will tell you that it's too common so it was left out.

I've been using teoma (http://www.teoma.com) or dogpile (http://www.dogpile.com) more than google lately though.

[AHunter3]

How does it know what terms are being or'ed and which ones are and'ed? How would it distinguish between this:

("hitchhiker" or "hitchhiking") and "last" and ("title" or "book" or "paperback") and not ("Adams" or "Galaxy") and ("sleuth" or "detective") and not "Milat"



and this:

(("hitchhiker" or ("hitchhiking" and "last")) and "title") or ("book" or "paperback") and (not "Adams") or ("Galaxy" and "sleuth") or ("detective" and not "Milat")

--?

[Lute Skywatcher]

As long as you get the page you want, does it really matter?

[AHunter3]

But the first search obtains something like 1700 or 1800 hits in Alta Vista (and the thing I was looking for originally is on the first page) whereas the second one obtains something along the lines of 7 million hits.

It ain't the same search at all.

It's like the difference between (2 + 5)/17 and 2 + (5/17)

[umop ap!sdn]

I prefer to use AltaVista. It's been my favorite since Lycos tampered with their format in 2001. I'm surprised AV is considered to be outdated because I was considering posting a thread on this subject! :eek:

[Lute Skywatcher]

Originally posted by AHunter3
It ain't the same search at all.Is that a "yes" or a "no"?

[AHunter3]

No, it isn't a "yes" or a "no".

[AHunter3]

Jeff Olsen: Is that a "yes" or a "no"?

::finally puzzles out what Jeff Olsen is asking::

Are you reiterating this question? As long as you get the page you want, does it really matter?

That doesn't make any sense. I use boolean searches to restrict my hits to a manageable size, to cut out the false positives. Here's the question I was searching for: ("What the heck was the name of that book I started to read in High School in the pharmacy? Can't recall the author, it was a mystery/detective book something like 'The Last Hitchhiker' or 'Girl Was Last Hitch-hiking' or something like that. Gotta screen out references to 'Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy of course, and that Milat book.")

Now there may be a page with that book's title on it buried somewhere in the 7 million hits generated by the second search string but who cares? If I did a search for "book" and got 70 million hits it would probably be among them as well, but that isn't useful.

So the answer to the question is yes, it does matter even if I "get the page I want", insofar as it doesn't do me any good if it's buried in an immense pile of pages I do not want like the proverbial needle in the haystack.

[Colophon]

AHunter3, Google assumes AND unless you specifically tell it otherwise with an OR or whatever.

[Lute Skywatcher]

Originally posted by AHunter3
So the answer to the question is yes, it does matter even if I "get the page I want", insofar as it doesn't do me any good if it's buried in an immense pile of pages I do not want like the proverbial needle in the haystack. Thank you. Now, assuming that book is indeed Last Bus to Woodstock, it's the first result from the search that Mr2001 suggested.

Seems Google isn't as ungainly as you think.

[AHunter3]

It's not Last Bus to Woodstock. It's Last Seen Hitchhiking.

[AHunter3]

AHunter3, Google assumes AND unless you specifically tell it otherwise with an OR or whatever.

Yeah, but how do you nest your terms? What differentiates this:

"last" and ("title" or "book" or "paperback")

from this:

("last" and "title") or ("book" or "paperback") -- ??

I understand I could enter:

last title OR book OR paperback

-- but how does Google know that the pages returned must each contain the word "last", in addition to which it must contain either the word "title", or "book" or "paperback"? Or, in the second example, that each page returned must contain either the word "last" or the word "title", in addition to which it must contain either the word "book" or the word "paperback"?

I'm not saying it can't, I'm just saying I don't understand the protocol for nesting the terms hierarchically.

[Lute Skywatcher]

Originally posted by AHunter3
It's not Last Bus to Woodstock. It's Last Seen Hitchhiking. Ah. Then page 2 of that search.

[Mr2001]

Originally posted by AHunter3
Yeah, but how do you nest your terms?
You don't. Google doesn't let you group terms, so this Google search:

foo bar OR baz bleck

... is always equivalent to this AltaVista search:

foo AND (bar OR baz) AND bleck

AFAIK there's no way to do this AltaVista search on Google:

(foo AND bar) OR (baz AND bleck)

[AHunter3]

Well, it looks like Google can do somewhat more complex searches than I was aware of, although still more limited than Alta Vista's boolean search field. And the syntax of boolean is just easier for me to bang out, it's just like fourth grade math. It's closer to how I think.

("easier to use" and "more powerful search specifications") and not ("larger total index")

is IMHO >

"more total hits" -"specificity" OR "good syntax"

[or would that be "more total hits" -"specificity" OR -"good syntax"?]

[amarinth]

For years, I did...because I like doing boolean searches, and google just couldn't do it. (As has been mentioned above.)

But they changed a few years ago, to make themselves more like google (or something) and harder to do booleans on. Maybe they've changed back, but there was a while when it wasn't handling nested ands, ors, and nots. All of a sudden, I was getting crap. So I stopped going there.

After this thread, maybe I'll start again - it was always much nicer to weed out the irrelevant sites...