# 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:** 2
**Author:** ![sparky\_1](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/77aa72/32.png) [@sparky\_1](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/sparky_1)\ **Post date:** [June 29, 2013, 3:12pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/alta-vista-turn-out-the-light-its-over-a-dogpile-question/662175/21 "2013-06-29T15:12:57Z")
A little aside, I’m shocked to see buildings with an Earthlink sign on them. I’ve seen maybe 4 in 3 different countries! I had no idea they were still around. ---
**Author:** ![sparky\_1](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/77aa72/32.png) [@sparky\_1](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/sparky_1)\ **Post date:** [June 29, 2013, 3:18pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/alta-vista-turn-out-the-light-its-over-a-dogpile-question/662175/22 "2013-06-29T15:18:07Z")
> [@chappachula](#): > > 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? I only recall using Alta Vista to try and find the good pr0n. 😃 ---
**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, 4:21pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/alta-vista-turn-out-the-light-its-over-a-dogpile-question/662175/23 "2013-06-29T16:21:24Z")
> [@sparky\_1](#): > > I only recall using Alta Vista to try and find the good pr0n. 😃 so I assume that you never tried hitler porn 🙂 ---
**Author:** ![Jophiel](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/jophiel/32/66_2.png) [@Jophiel](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Jophiel)\ **Post date:** [June 29, 2013, 5:16pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/alta-vista-turn-out-the-light-its-over-a-dogpile-question/662175/24 "2013-06-29T17:16:35Z")
> [@DataX](#): > > Alta Vista was popular late 90s. It kinda was the same crowd that liked Google - so as Google went up - Alta Vista went down. Yeah, I remember AV being a cleaner solution during a time when everyone else was going all “portal” and cluttering their screens with celebrity news and weather and email services. This was the same thing that made Google immediately appealing – it was just a search engine. Even now, it’s a search engine with some text links to other services. My original search engine love though was Infoseek back in early days before it was bought out. ---
**Author:** ![pulykamell](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/pulykamell/32/3166_2.png) [@pulykamell](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/pulykamell)\ **Post date:** [June 29, 2013, 5:31pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/alta-vista-turn-out-the-light-its-over-a-dogpile-question/662175/25 "2013-06-29T17:31:09Z")
> [@DataX](#): > > Dogpile never was on top. Hell, I don’t even remember Dogpile. Typically I would use Yahoo for general categories of information, and AltaVista for exact string queries. Basically, what **RealityChuck** said. I would occasionally use Lycos as well. I hated AskJeeves. And there was one more…I’m blanking on the name, but it had a ship as a logo, IIRC. It would occasionally dig up stuff the other ones and early Google wouldn’t. Like I seem to remember it having some limited newspaper searching capability or something like that. ETA: Ah, I remember now. It was Northern Light. ---
**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, 5:36pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/alta-vista-turn-out-the-light-its-over-a-dogpile-question/662175/26 "2013-06-29T17:36:08Z")
Archie and Veronica search engines are still out there. Veronica is handy for searching Gopher sites. Veronica is still very active. Archie isn’t very useful anymore. I haven’t visited a FTP server in a decade. ---
**Author:** ![pulykamell](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/pulykamell/32/3166_2.png) [@pulykamell](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/pulykamell)\ **Post date:** [June 29, 2013, 5:40pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/alta-vista-turn-out-the-light-its-over-a-dogpile-question/662175/27 "2013-06-29T17:40:16Z")
> [@aceplace57](#): > > Archie and Veronica search engines are still out there. Veronica is handy for searching Gopher sites. Veronica is still very active. > > Archie isn’t very useful anymore. I haven’t visited a FTP server in a decade. Have you Gophered lately? I don’t recall using Gopher since about 1995 or so. (But I FTP all the time for business. Even have an FTP client on my phone.) ---
**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, 5:42pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/alta-vista-turn-out-the-light-its-over-a-dogpile-question/662175/28 "2013-06-29T17:42:03Z")
Once in awhile I Gopher. Theres an add in for Firefox that supports it. But I rarely use it anymore. ---
**Author:** ![pulykamell](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/pulykamell/32/3166_2.png) [@pulykamell](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/pulykamell)\ **Post date:** [June 29, 2013, 6:34pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/alta-vista-turn-out-the-light-its-over-a-dogpile-question/662175/29 "2013-06-29T18:34:09Z")
> [@aceplace57](#): > > Once in awhile I Gopher. Theres an add in for Firefox that supports it. But I rarely use it anymore. I kinda want to check it out and see what’s still around. I’m surprised that Gopher sites are still maintained. ---
**Author:** ![RaftPeople](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/6f9a4e/32.png) [@RaftPeople](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/RaftPeople)\ **Post date:** [June 29, 2013, 6:44pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/alta-vista-turn-out-the-light-its-over-a-dogpile-question/662175/30 "2013-06-29T18:44:47Z")
> [@chappachula](#): > > 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? AltaVista had a great advanced search capability, it’s something I want regularly and I don’t know if it exists anymore. Google is great for getting a page of most common hits, but when you need to get more advanced it pretty much sucks. ---
**Author:** ![friedo](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/f/8edcca/32.png) [@friedo](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/friedo)\ **Post date:** [June 29, 2013, 6:46pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/alta-vista-turn-out-the-light-its-over-a-dogpile-question/662175/31 "2013-06-29T18:46:49Z")
Gopher is awesome. I mean technologically as well as nostalgia-wise. It supported hypermedia before there was HTTP and HTML. I fondly remember nights spent trying to tease useful information out of AOL WebCrawler on 14.4k dialup. But the first search engine I ever used was the ShareWare Search on CompuServe. I still remember my nine-digit octal user ID number. ---
**Author:** ![Saintly\_Loser](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/saintly_loser/32/4045_2.png) [@Saintly\_Loser](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Saintly_Loser)\ **Post date:** [June 29, 2013, 8:48pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/alta-vista-turn-out-the-light-its-over-a-dogpile-question/662175/32 "2013-06-29T20:48:19Z")
> [@Amateur\_Barbarian](#): > > 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.) Yes. WordPerfect is arguably still a better program than MS Word. And it absolutely was a better program than Word for a long time. Nonetheless, it’s nearly dead. Its market share is, what, something like 3%? And I wonder how many of those buyers are legacies – people who have been upgrading every time a new version comes out. It’s completely gone from the business market. Law firms, which used to _love_ WordPerfect, have abandoned it. Some government legal departments still use it (I believe the DOJ still runs on WordPerfect), and large law firms will have one copy installed somewhere in their document processing centers just in case, but it’s dead. They let Microsoft get so far ahead they could never recover. They just fell too far behind in getting their Windows version out, and they never caught up. They never developed a decent applications suite, never (I know there was a suite at one point, and probably still is, but it’s more like a bunch of bundled applications than a truly integrated suite of programs), which is a part of the problem. Microsoft will happily sell you Word, Excel and PowerPoint, and Access, too, and all of the programs can swap data and embed objects in each other (with the exception of Visio). And that’s what the business market wants. So the lesson is, I guess, that better business practices will trump a better program every time. I don’t know if that will ever apply to Google, or if it did apply to Alta Vista, but the lesson is there. ---
**Author:** ![Justin\_Bailey](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/justin_bailey/32/8792_2.png) [@Justin\_Bailey](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Justin_Bailey)\ **Post date:** [June 29, 2013, 9:26pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/alta-vista-turn-out-the-light-its-over-a-dogpile-question/662175/33 "2013-06-29T21:26:10Z")
> [@Amateur\_Barbarian](#): > > 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. I’m not sure you understand just how big Google is. ---
**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, 9:32pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/alta-vista-turn-out-the-light-its-over-a-dogpile-question/662175/34 "2013-06-29T21:32:15Z")
> [@Justin\_Bailey](#): > > I’m not sure you understand just how big Google is. Of course I do. Did you have a point? Or are you implying that Google is so big no one will ever be able to buy it? ---
**Author:** ![Justin\_Bailey](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/justin_bailey/32/8792_2.png) [@Justin\_Bailey](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Justin_Bailey)\ **Post date:** [June 29, 2013, 9:47pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/alta-vista-turn-out-the-light-its-over-a-dogpile-question/662175/35 "2013-06-29T21:47:35Z")
> [@Amateur\_Barbarian](#): > > Of course I do. Did you have a point? **Or are you implying that Google is so big no one will ever be able to buy it?** Precisely. Google has a market cap of almost $300 billion. They’re one of the biggest companies in the world. Barring some catastrophic stock collapse, they’re the ones doing the buying. Always. ---
**Author:** ![Chronos](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/chronos/32/134_2.png) [@Chronos](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Chronos)\ **Post date:** [June 29, 2013, 9:47pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/alta-vista-turn-out-the-light-its-over-a-dogpile-question/662175/36 "2013-06-29T21:47:48Z")
I think the point is that Google could only be bought out by someone significantly larger, and there _is_ no one who’s large enough. If Microsoft could buy out Google, they’d have done it already. Who else is even a contender? And I, too, remember AltaVista in its glory days. One time, I was searching for a particular piece of software, and got no search results… But did get a targeted ad for exactly the program I was searching for. ---
**Author:** ![Chronos](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/chronos/32/134_2.png) [@Chronos](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Chronos)\ **Post date:** [June 29, 2013, 9:50pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/alta-vista-turn-out-the-light-its-over-a-dogpile-question/662175/37 "2013-06-29T21:50:03Z")
Huh, that’s funny, when the page came up after my post, **Amateur Barbarian** ’s post was still unedited, but **Justin \_Bailey** ’s post quoting the edited version was there. I guess the updater just checks for new posts, not edits to old ones. ---
**Author:** ![AHunter3](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/ahunter3/32/368_2.png) [@AHunter3](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/AHunter3)\ **Post date:** [June 30, 2013, 6:10am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/alta-vista-turn-out-the-light-its-over-a-dogpile-question/662175/38 "2013-06-30T06:10:04Z")
Google never, at any time, caught up with the true boolean search window that Alta Vista once provided as its advanced search. I really miss AV. ---
**Author:** ![digs](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/digs/32/14889_2.png) [@digs](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/digs)\ **Post date:** [June 30, 2013, 6:19am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/alta-vista-turn-out-the-light-its-over-a-dogpile-question/662175/39 "2013-06-30T06:19:21Z")
> [@Little\_Nemo](#): > > 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?” “Oh, and remember **FaceButt** … or **ButtBook**? Whatever. That thing where people would get all dramatic and talk about themselves? Man, there’s a pre-2020 concept, eh, “talking about yourself”. Whoa, what were we thinking?” ---
**Author:** ![Guinastasia](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/guinastasia/32/5751_2.png) [@Guinastasia](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Guinastasia)\ **Post date:** [June 30, 2013, 6:23am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/alta-vista-turn-out-the-light-its-over-a-dogpile-question/662175/40 "2013-06-30T06:23:35Z")
> [@RealityChuck](#): > > 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. Lycos and Magellan were my big faves back in the day. That was also when Netscape was king. Ah, the 90s. I miss you so. 😉 [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/alta-vista-turn-out-the-light-its-over-a-dogpile-question/662175.md?page=1) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/alta-vista-turn-out-the-light-its-over-a-dogpile-question/662175.md?page=3)