# Alta Vista--turn out the light. It's over. (A dogpile question) **URL:** \ **Category:** Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share\ **Created:** [June 29, 2013, 2:19am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/alta-vista-turn-out-the-light-its-over-a-dogpile-question/662175 "2013-06-29T02:19:19Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![samclem](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/a9a28c/32.png) [@samclem](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/samclem)\ **Post date:** [June 29, 2013, 2:19am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/alta-vista-turn-out-the-light-its-over-a-dogpile-question/662175/1 "2013-06-29T02:19:19Z")
> **[A hail and farewell to AltaVista](https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/a-hail-and-farewell-to-altavista/)** > > It once was the best of the bunch, in the era before Internet search meant Google and three guys named Moe. Ancient history by now. They finally pulled the plug. What I want to know,and I supposed I could Google it(the irony), is when Alta Vista was the premier search engine and when did Dogpile win out? ---
**Author:** ![samclem](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/a9a28c/32.png) [@samclem](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/samclem)\ **Post date:** [June 29, 2013, 2:22am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/alta-vista-turn-out-the-light-its-over-a-dogpile-question/662175/2 "2013-06-29T02:22:02Z")
Actually, this might be a learning thread for when various search engines came into being and when the next one blew it out of the water. ---
**Author:** ![DataX](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/e99b99/32.png) [@DataX](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/DataX)\ **Post date:** [June 29, 2013, 2:38am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/alta-vista-turn-out-the-light-its-over-a-dogpile-question/662175/3 "2013-06-29T02:38:42Z")
Dogpile never was on top. Alta Vista was popular late 90s. It kinda was the same crowd that liked Google - so as Google went up - Alta Vista went down. Trying to find one of Danny Sullivan’s old graphs, but having trouble… ---
**Author:** ![cochrane](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/cochrane/32/10441_2.png) [@cochrane](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/cochrane)\ **Post date:** [June 29, 2013, 3:42am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/alta-vista-turn-out-the-light-its-over-a-dogpile-question/662175/4 "2013-06-29T03:42:27Z")
“Three guys named Moe”? 😕 ---
**Author:** ![Joey\_P](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/j/919ad9/32.png) [@Joey\_P](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Joey_P)\ **Post date:** [June 29, 2013, 3:50am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/alta-vista-turn-out-the-light-its-over-a-dogpile-question/662175/5 "2013-06-29T03:50:09Z")
Since I didn’t know Altavista still existed to begin with, I went and checked…Webcrawler is still there. It’s funny, when I listen to Car Talk, they have a lot of ads for businesses that aren’t around anymore (since they just interject them into the show themselves). AltaVista is one of them…or they are now anyways. ---
**Author:** ![gaffa](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/g/e68b1a/32.png) [@gaffa](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/gaffa)\ **Post date:** [June 29, 2013, 5:47am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/alta-vista-turn-out-the-light-its-over-a-dogpile-question/662175/6 "2013-06-29T05:47:21Z")
> [@cochrane](#): > > “Three guys named Moe”? 😕 I presume [DuckDuckGo](https://duckduckgo.com/). In Cockney rhyming slang. ---
**Author:** ![GIGObuster](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/gigobuster/32/421_2.png) [@GIGObuster](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/GIGObuster)\ **Post date:** [June 29, 2013, 5:55am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/alta-vista-turn-out-the-light-its-over-a-dogpile-question/662175/7 "2013-06-29T05:55:39Z")
Before Google became my default, I liked HotBot, amazingly it is still out there. ---
**Author:** ![wolfman](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/w/a8b319/32.png) [@wolfman](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/wolfman)\ **Post date:** [June 29, 2013, 5:57am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/alta-vista-turn-out-the-light-its-over-a-dogpile-question/662175/8 "2013-06-29T05:57:25Z")
God I’m old and forgetful. I remember when altavista was the only engine worth using. They had the first Babel Fish. But if you had asked me today before I read that article what the best search engines had been, I never would have remembered it independently. ---
**Author:** ![Little\_Nemo](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/little_nemo/32/3120_2.png) [@Little\_Nemo](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Little_Nemo)\ **Post date:** [June 29, 2013, 6:03am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/alta-vista-turn-out-the-light-its-over-a-dogpile-question/662175/9 "2013-06-29T06:03:50Z")
Makes you wonder what current giants will be forgotten. It seems unthinkable but maybe in ten years there’ll be some backpage announcement that Google is being shut down and we’ll all be saying “Oh, right, Google, I remember that. That was still around?” ---
**Author:** ![njtt](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/n/ecd19e/32.png) [@njtt](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/njtt)\ **Post date:** [June 29, 2013, 7:11am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/alta-vista-turn-out-the-light-its-over-a-dogpile-question/662175/10 "2013-06-29T07:11:35Z")
IIRC, Dogpile wasn’t even a search engine, it was a search engine aggregator. It sent your query to several actual search engines (of which ther were quite a few back then) and returned a combined list of results. In that era there were several such aggregator sites. Dogpile may, perhaps, have been the most popular amongst them (although I would have guessed AskJeeves, which I think was an aggregator for at least some of its history, but still survives today in some form), and some people may have liked aggregators, but I do not think any of them were ever all that popular compared to AltaVista and other “primary” engines. Getting _more_ results from your search (as aggregators would do) was not, usually, particularly desirable. The problem with early search engines was not that they did not return enough results, it ws that you often had to wade through pages and pages of irrelevant garbage that just happened to have you search terms in it before you found what you were really looking for (if you ever did). Google’s big advantage, when it came along, was that it ordered its results much better (by using its PageRank system of measuring link popularity). Personally, AltaVista remained my favorite search engine until Google came along, although it was not head and shoulders above the others. Northern Light was pretty good for a while, and some people swore by HotBot. Also, in those days, human made web directories like the ODP ([still going](http://www.dmoz.org/)) and Yahoo ([still there too](http://dir.yahoo.com/), to my surprise) were often more useful search tools than engines were. ---
**Author:** ![GuanoLad](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/guanolad/32/42_2.png) [@GuanoLad](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/GuanoLad)\ **Post date:** [June 29, 2013, 7:16am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/alta-vista-turn-out-the-light-its-over-a-dogpile-question/662175/11 "2013-06-29T07:16:37Z")
Seems unlikely that Google will ever shut down, but I could believe Yahoo might implode somehow, or [Ask.com](http://Ask.com) (who were once AskJeeves, remember them?) may wake up and realise they’re peddling crap nobody pays any attention to. ---
**Author:** ![Little\_Nemo](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/little_nemo/32/3120_2.png) [@Little\_Nemo](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Little_Nemo)\ **Post date:** [June 29, 2013, 7:30am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/alta-vista-turn-out-the-light-its-over-a-dogpile-question/662175/12 "2013-06-29T07:30:54Z")
> [@GuanoLad](#): > > Seems unlikely that Google will ever shut down, but I could believe Yahoo might implode somehow, or [Ask.com](http://Ask.com) (who were once AskJeeves, remember them?) may wake up and realise they’re peddling crap nobody pays any attention to. Fifteen years ago, it would have seemed unlikely Alta Vista would ever shut down. ---
**Author:** ![aruvqan](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/aruvqan/32/2891_2.png) [@aruvqan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/aruvqan)\ **Post date:** [June 29, 2013, 9:52am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/alta-vista-turn-out-the-light-its-over-a-dogpile-question/662175/13 "2013-06-29T09:52:31Z")
My first searches were done with [Mata Hari](http://www.sharewarejunkies.com/00zwd6/mata_hari.htm) … _sigh_ I loved loading her with what I wanted and going to bed and waking up to a whole lot of links to rummage through. ---
**Author:** ![Sr\_Siete](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/6de8d8/32.png) [@Sr\_Siete](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Sr_Siete)\ **Post date:** [June 29, 2013, 10:48am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/alta-vista-turn-out-the-light-its-over-a-dogpile-question/662175/14 "2013-06-29T10:48:47Z")
I remember in the late 90’s blowing people away whenever I advised them to stop using Yahoo or Altavista and give Alltheweb a try. Made me feel like an expert. Alltheweb was Google before Google. I just read it ceased existing in 2011. RIP, my old friend. ---
**Author:** ![freckafree](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/freckafree/32/3050_2.png) [@freckafree](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/freckafree)\ **Post date:** [June 29, 2013, 11:03am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/alta-vista-turn-out-the-light-its-over-a-dogpile-question/662175/15 "2013-06-29T11:03:10Z")
When I looked at the screen shot in the article, I remembered that the thing I loved about Alta Vista was the “Ask Alta Vista a question” feature. I still sometimes pose a search query as a question with Google, which generally yields terrible results. ---
**Author:** ![RealityChuck](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/realitychuck/32/195_2.png) [@RealityChuck](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/RealityChuck)\ **Post date:** [June 29, 2013, 12:35pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/alta-vista-turn-out-the-light-its-over-a-dogpile-question/662175/16 "2013-06-29T12:35:20Z")
No love for Lycos? In the 90s, I stuck with Yahoo as a directory (e.g., if you were searching for a particular business or service) and Alta Vista to search for a given term. Tried most of the rest, but until Google came around, I never found anything better. ---
**Author:** ![Amateur\_Barbarian](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/59ef9b/32.png) [@Amateur\_Barbarian](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Amateur_Barbarian)\ **Post date:** [June 29, 2013, 2:21pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/alta-vista-turn-out-the-light-its-over-a-dogpile-question/662175/17 "2013-06-29T14:21:28Z")
> [@GuanoLad](#): > > Seems unlikely that Google will ever shut down… In name, probably not. In ownership and function, almost certainly. All those who comfort themselves over Google’s massive sweep of power and control by chanting “Don’t Be Evil” need to consider what happens when Google is bought by an entity that tore the evil page out of their dictionary… I mean, deleted the link to the definition of “evil” in their databases. ---
**Author:** ![Amateur\_Barbarian](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/59ef9b/32.png) [@Amateur\_Barbarian](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Amateur_Barbarian)\ **Post date:** [June 29, 2013, 2:25pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/alta-vista-turn-out-the-light-its-over-a-dogpile-question/662175/18 "2013-06-29T14:25:58Z")
> [@Little\_Nemo](#): > > Fifteen years ago, it would have seemed unlikely Alta Vista would ever shut down. Disagree. It was an era when things like portals and search engines were clawing for clicks and were subject to losing them to whatever came along next. There was no “investment” and no cost beyond eventually changing a bookmark or default search link. It was easy to see that something better would be around next year. Far too many people are deeply embedded in Google-land and would have to make a significant effort to move away from it. It’s more difficult to figure out how expensive, deeply embedded and market-dominating software like WordPerfect can be displaced. The investment in software, training and experience is deep… but like any ten other such “world-owning” packages, they eventually found a way to run things off the rails. (WP’s was dismissing a Windows version in favor of an OS/2 version, pretty much… and then the CEO was petty and juvenile about finally releasing a crippled Windows version. Too late; even the crude and broken early versions of Word for Windows had a running head start they’d never overtake.) ---
**Author:** ![aceplace57](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/aceplace57/32/3500_2.png) [@aceplace57](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/aceplace57)\ **Post date:** [June 29, 2013, 2:27pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/alta-vista-turn-out-the-light-its-over-a-dogpile-question/662175/19 "2013-06-29T14:27:26Z")
Alta Vista was my home page for years. Good bye old friend. ---
**Author:** ![chappachula](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/d2c977/32.png) [@chappachula](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/chappachula)\ **Post date:** [June 29, 2013, 2:36pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/alta-vista-turn-out-the-light-its-over-a-dogpile-question/662175/20 "2013-06-29T14:36:38Z")
Altavista allowed great use of wild cards. And was better than hotbot or lycos. As I recall, a hotbot search on “hitler” would give you neo-nazi militia groups as the top links. On Altavista, you got legitimate historical info. Does anybody know if I’m my memory is right? [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/alta-vista-turn-out-the-light-its-over-a-dogpile-question/662175.md?page=2)