I was one of the last people I know to quit using Alta Vista preferentially over Google. They had a boolean Advanced Search which I really miss. But they did something at some unknown point which screwed up their own search engine’s behavior. Their boolean search stopped working.
AlltheWeb has one and I occasionally go there but they don’t seem to have the indexing depth, so like everyone else I mostly use Google now.
I hate their interface though. Why can’t they do an Advanced Search that doesn’t treat us all like we’re congenital idiots? Why can’t we have a boolean box to type our own search equations, with parentheses and the whole works?
I used MSN search and later Dogpile up to around 1999 or 2000, when I read a rundown of search engines in the paper that mentioned an up-and-rising engine I’d never heard of that apparently didn’t sell results to the highest bidder (I had no idea that went on!). Within a year, I’d completely switched to Google. All the good Dogpile results were from Google anyway.
Who else here remembers getting an email from Steve Gibson somewhere back in 1997 or 1998 about these two college kids who created a search program as a senior project or whatever, and that it was really slick and you really should give it a try?
It was probably the first and last piece of spam that I paid attention to.
They weren’t college kids. They were grad students in CS and it was a business, not a project. From the beginning Sergey was obviously going to go commercial with it.
I could always find what I wanted with AltaVista, and way easier than with Google. but you had to use AND/OR and so on. If you were good at AltaVista’s searching rules, you could find what you were looking for very accurately, but I think most people weren’t terribly good at it.
This is probably the prevailing reason Google ‘won’. Sure, accurate search results are great (and important), but they’ve shared research that basically says “the faster we made it, the more people used it”. Even if you get slightly worse results, but can do 2 or 3 refined searches in the time it takes to do 1 at a competitor, people are happier.
Yes, I’m vastly oversimplifying the entire picture; but as I’ve seen on Google tshirts at conferences, “fast is my favorite feature”.
