How is it that Google has utterly eclipsed Alta Vista as the search engine of choice for so many people? I’ll readily admit that the annoying pop up ads and the horrendous page formatting problems that have been part of Alta Vista off and on over the past couple of years have been a nuisance, but it can’t be that alone.
I do like Google’s cached pages, which allow you to view sites that have vaporized since being indexed, and there are times that I get the feeling that I get more hits from Google than from Alta Vista, making me believe that Alta Vista’s spiders are less industrious.
But Google’s advanced search screen is rather limited in specification power compared to Alta Vista’s full-fledged boolean field. You can’t do a Google search for (“hitchhiker” or “hitchhiking”) and “last” and (“title” or “book” or “paperback”) and not (“Adams” or “Galaxy”) and (“sleuth” or “detective”) and not “Milat”*
Since at least half of the time that I go to a search engine I’m going to need Advanced Search to do anything useful, I tend to head for Alta Vista first unless I’m searching for images or newsgroup postings.
Been using Google first for quite a while. Someone recently posted http://dmoz.org/ which I may start using because it does seem to cut thru the crap. A few years or so ago I liked Dogpile.
I love Google - the Google toolbar is the greatest tool for the 'net yet invented. Well, ok, maybe I’m exaggerating a bit.
Of course, I never have a need to search quite so specifically as AHunter - but by the time I’d have figured out that entire sequence of boolean I could have just done ‘search within results’ several times (even if it’s not as accurate). You have to go to school to learn that AH?
I can’t believe I used to search without Google. Anything I ever need to find, they can hunt down. It’s no surprise that “Google” is now a verb (i.e.-“Let me Google that.” “I’m Googling it right now.”)
God, that sounds just like a commercial, doesn’t it. I swear I don’t work for them.
For quite a while, Alta Vista was useless to me by ranking their sponsers first, any search for a book would yield about 50 hits for amazon.com first, then, buried amidst other commercial links, I might find info about the book.
I understand it’s not doing it any more (I just checked: it’s now doing the “sponsered link” thing that Google does), but during it’s sell-out period, I switched to Google and got in the habit of not using Alta-Vista.
I love Google, and one thing I especially love is that you tend to get better results searching Google for “my search terms site:whatever.com” than you get searching whatever.com’s own search engine for “my search terms”.
I used altavista. Then I tried google, it blew altavista away, so I’ve used google since. I just went back to altavista - it seems a lot better. Am I imagining that?
The point is, few people bother to research a new search engine. Google was a lot better than altavista (and had some cool features like spell check and newsgroups iirc) and enough people switched that everyone knew it was the new thing. As good as a new search engine (or old one) might be now, if its not that leap better, Joe Searcher won’t bother to find out.
small hijack: What is going on with Ask Jeeves (www.ask.com)? I never used it, but recently tried it and got nothing useful, only a huge amount of ads for things that were not even remotely related!!
On Google and Altavista, I prefer Google for the reasons Shade mentioned. Altavista just feels outdated somehow, and after their “sellout” phase, I just can’t be bothered to try again.
Altavista hasn’t nearly been able to keep up with adding web pages like Google has. According to figures I’ve seen online, Altavista’s database is languishing at less than a billion pages, while Google is up over two billion.
As of June of this year, a search engine I’ve never used (alltheweb.com) appears to have edged out Google (when you’re talking about numbers this big, 20 million does seem like a razor thin margin!) for the largest search database:
Currently on their respective front pages, the following figures are given for the number of web pages searchable:
AlltheWeb: 2,112,188,990
Google: 3,083,324,652
However, I seem to remember that only about 2 billion of Google’s web pages count, or something odd like that. I think there’s more to it than this one figure.
Huh. I’d never noticed those tiny letters on the bottom of the Google page. Perhaps the 3 billion counts Usenet posts and archived pages that no longer exist?
Sparse front page. I don’t need 200 little graphics and text boxes all lined up so they look nice in a browser that I don’t use. Simpler is always better (and faster, more readable, more compatible, …)
Good search mechanics. Lots of pages and ranked well. I am shocked at how I can find those “couple of pages” only on Google. Even though they are still on the Web and years old.
Implicit “and” of keywords. If I type in 3 keywords I want pages only with all 3 of them <insert foul language>. I don’t want to type in any <ifl> “+” signs.
The only downside to me (and I do very fancy searches at times) is no wildcards ("?" and “*”).
One very depressing aspect of how the Web has turned out is how web page “designers” (hah!) think the opposite of #3 is good. A lot of sites I visit have less than 10% content/page now. Do these people have any brain cells?
