I recall a dinner party where a few people were discussing the web, probably 1994. Essentially we all agreed the web was unusable because it was too hard to find what you were looking for; the best ideas we had for solving that problem were pretty bad.
Google changed the world. What used to be buried on the 3rd or 4th page of Altavista results, if it appeared at all, was suddenly front and center. (Yahoo’s directory was rarely useful at all.)
I’m not a fan of Google today, but for years I would tell everyone I knew about it.
Do you think Google is the new AOL? Way back AOL had their homepage where you saw an AOL recommended part of the web. You still had access to the web but for most first time users it was easier to use than a web browser alone.
I say this because I’ve been wondering if we now have a Google snapshot of the web instead of AOLs homepage. Don’t get me wrong search is much better than a more or less static homepage of topics.
One of those "Google is the new AOL" moments hit me when I heard a commercial for Google on the radio recently. Specifically, it was someone explaining that they had a feature built especially for veterans to find jobs relevant to them, and that you could get to it by typing "jobs for veterans" into Google search.
It just sounded so much like the old AOL Keyword feature, which a lot of people forgot about, but was literally often advertised on TV or radio as how to get to a given site or web feature.
I think the crux of the others’ point is that Google’s increasingly complex secret sauce for returning search results, combined with its general ubiquity, has perhaps created a monoculture whereby we view the Web almost entirely through Google’s lens. AOL’s “curation” of the web via its portal was a bit more direct for sure, but I can see how the effect could be similar.
Oh believe me you can find all sorts of non curated filth as well using Google as well. I think it is still a pretty good engine for "if you insist, here is the path to rabbit hole". If you let google know about you, it will tune the results for you. I keep my history for this reason.
It’s not comparing technical merit or business decisions. AOL for a long time was the window into the web for lots of American users. Google is now a window into the web for users around the world.
Google’s algorithms have the ability to make companies essentially undiscoverable, deliberately or not, so there’s at least some comparison to be made with AOL’s keyword registry.
Interestingly, that was the idea I distinctly remember from the dinner party: someone suggested the only fix for Internet searches was to implement something like AOL Keywords globally. A central registry of keywords.
What would you be trying to "fix" here? More often than not, the first result for a given query on most common search engines is the correct, authoritative source for something. If I search for a company, the company's official website is nearly always the first real result.
The only thing I think is really wrong with search (and all major search engines right now are guilty of this) is making paid ads look very similar to real results, which makes it possible to pay to hijack a result.
I used to work for a company making a SaaS tool for SEO teams to use to see how their site was ranking for their desired keywords on Google. This meant searching Google six million times a day from a motley crew of grey-market proxies and IPv6 providers.
We're definitely in a Google bubble. It becomes very clear that they have intense control over what shows up on the first page of searches, especially in their Featured Snippets and Carousels at the top, and their native-looking ad results.
Control over search results is incredibly powerful in terms of anything from influencing the zeitgeist, to controlling marketing efforts at a grand scale, through to straight propaganda.
We really run an incredible risk as a society by putting too many eggs into the Google basket. Using their browser to use their service to consume their results means a complete monoculture; and while they're not really visibly abusing it now, it's clear that they can subtly manipulate things for a long time before they get caught, and they have the platform to be able to do far more should they (or any government actor forcing their hand) decide they want to.
For a long time I used yahoo. The nice thing with a directory is that if you found an interesting website you could look up similar websites in the same yahoo category. I think this functionality is just gone.
Are there any sites with a "crowdsourced" directory? Might be interesting to have something like wiki-pedia that is a curated source, but curated by a larger group of volunteers. Although, I could see it getting corrupted by marketing purposes, but at the same time it might be able to be maintained cheaply by a foundation. Human intelligence providing grouped sites might be a useful asset, and there could be statistics/requirements for getting listed.
I had a good experience with Altavista via the "NEAR" operator which was never fully implemented by Google (there is a wildcard "*" in Google added much later). With the NEAR operator you can find pages where terms are closer and narrow the results. Without NEAR terms can appear in discrete places of the page.
I think I switched from Hotbot to Google around 2000, maybe 2001. I told everybody I knew about the fantastic new search engine. Their plucky upstart vibe made them seem like they were carrying forward the spirit of the internet back then, before they ate the internet.
Yeah, I had the same history. Google worked better than keyword search because the web was young and naive and not built by evil spammers yet, and people had not figured out how to game PageRank. That lasted a few years. Now it is mush again.
> Essentially we all agreed the web was unusable because it was too hard to find what you were looking for
Back in those days, I was a fan on the Yahoo! directory approach. The web was still small and explore-able, so a directory actually was useful if you didn't actually know what you were specifically looking for.
Meanwhile, if I did know what I was looking for, AltaVista gave me endless pages of random links that were only vaguely related to my search query. I don't think I ever found myself liking it much.
I know it's a bit of a fashion here to bash Google but so many Google products still 'spark joy' in my life. Maps, GMail Search, Photos, Translate, Speech Recognition etc.
Altavista was my favorite search engine before Google. Being able to put in a query (which could have logical expressions) instead of a directory of links was awesome!
Altavisa and astalavista for years! Astalavista was for your all your serialz, crackz and porn passwords back in the day of http basic auth and 56.6k modems
Neither did I! And I'm a bit humored to see other people pronounced it like that too :) I wonder what causes it, regional dialect or something? I'm part-Mexican, grew up bilingual and it just sort of happened without thinking about it, I discovered 'warez', immediately pronounced it "Juarez" (without the Spanish jota inflection) and it took 30 years (today) to learn it's 'wares'.
I used to hear both pretty regularly, talking to BBS folks back in the day. Thankfully, nobody really seemed to fight about it like the pronunciation of "GIF"...
I had to Google (amusingly) to ensure I had my historical pedantic pet peeve correct (memories can fail us).
It was just 56k. I seem to recall back in the day people appended the ".6" for no apparent reason other than it sorta seemed logical after we had 14.4k, 28.8k, 33.6k, and then.. all of a sudden.. 56k.
(and, if I recall correctly, for technical reasons it was really only 52k, and even then, only if you were lucky, usually it was less.
I seem to recall that the equipment was theoretically capable of 56k but in actual implementation, even a perfect POTS system wouldn't do over 52k, and in the real world, it would usually negotiate lower due to distance from CO, quality and number of connections and equipment in between, etc).
Starting 2005 both altavista and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AlltheWeb were just frontend templates and CSS stylesheets around the Yahoo search, even ran on the same servers. I'm surprised Yahoo kept the separate brands live until 2011.
Altavista was a great showcase on how powerfull servers and internet were at that era: before it, internet was considered something that needed Yellow Pages to be viable. With altavista the content gained relevance over the location, suddenly you didn't need to know where to find it, knowing what you wanted was enought.
Google was a big step afterwards, showing that even when you know what you want, you might not express it correctly, so having some ranking on results was helpful.
If I remember correctly, Altavista produced better results than Google back then, for me at least. However, Altavista took seconds to load the first page (on 56k) whereas Google's first page loaded almost immediately.
I honestly didn't expect Google to have survived the dot-com bust back then. This was before they figured out online adword auctions.
Google was immediately better then anything else from day one. Google was launched in Fall of 1997. In January 98 is when I started using it and it was hands down better then crawlers or any other search engine.
I fear all we have now is anecdotal evidence. :-) In my case, it was a gradual conversion to Google from Altavista than something immediate.
So, funny thing: Back then, if one search engine didn't have what you were looking for, you would try another. Now, if Google doesn't have what you are looking for, where do you go? Does it mean the answer does not exist on the Internet? Do you try Bing or Duck?
There are effectively only two competitive search engines in the U.S. and European markets today. In those markets, Bing is the only market pressure keeping Google honest.
There are only three major worldwide English language indexes—Google, Bing and Yandex. For all the praise DDG gets here, it couldn't exist without Bing.
I think I started using the internet in 1997, and used Altavista because the results were better than Google. Wasn't until ~2000 that I began to find results on Google faster than Altavista.
It was probably subjective but IMO google wasn't better initially, but it did end up being the best. Even tho I use bing or ddg, Google still has the best search engine.
> However, Altavista took seconds to load the first page (on 56k) whereas Google's first page loaded almost immediately.
That's why I moved from Altavista to Google. Google had a minimalist homepage and results page which were focussed and loaded very quickly compared to the bloated pages (for the time) of Altavista and Yahoo.
This was my experience as well. I had a deep link to AltaVista's "advanced" search page which loaded plenty fast.
Between AV and InfoSeek (which I used the Netscape plugin to get a browser search bar for) I was seeing better results than Google until sometime in the mid-00's.
Sure if you wanted to skim the surface of what was available on a given topic or just wanted the most popular links, Google was fine in the 90's and early 00's; But if you were deep diving or wanted something more obscure you needed other search engines.
... and in 2019 the "digital.com" domain is apparently hosted by a site that can't handle the traffic of this article. SPECIAL BONUS: Their current robots.txt appears to be blocking the old Digital.com pages from the WayBack machine. Argh.
It's apparently owned by a UK company called Quality Nonsense - https://qualitynonsense.com/portfolio/digital-com/ - currently featuring such insightful content as "Error establishing a database connection".
They do at least acknowledge the history of the name, though you'll do some scrolling to see it: https://digital.com/about/
That said, being a nerd of a certain age range, I saw "digital.com" and I got very excited about something I didn't get when I actually clicked on the link ...
Hmmm, and their robots.txt seems to not be at fault. I wonder if they excluded it to not overlap with Alta Vista, still it's tragic that digital.com isn't browsable in the wayback machine.
What I miss most about Altavista was the boolean search operators, and being able to reliably insist that words either must or must not appear in the results with the + and - characters. With Google these operators are seemingly just hints that it feels free to ignore.
I’ve seen academics upset that Google insisted on changing their search term from “adsorb” to “absorb”. Apparently Google Scholar (?) couldn’t be forced the way Google.com could be.
I'm nostagic for precise search, but I wonder how it would have fared with the scale we have now.
(Edit: scale and diversity of input data but also audiences)
Google regularly fails to include all words I searched (even if it's only three or four), often retrieving completely useless results. I doubt it's due to incompetence; I take it as a signal that they're now struggling to match the volume and characteristics of the data they have to ingest to an adequate user experience.
I suspect it's a reflection of the way the majority of their audience interacts with search.
For a large number of people, Google's ability to answer the underlying question, rather than explicitly identify pages where all search terms appear, means it works better. If you think of Google as a way to get answers, this is good.
If you think of Google as a search engine, and particularly if you have historical experience with (and expectations of) search engines, this is very frustrating. And the workarounds of clicking the "must contain" link (or surrounding all of your search terms with quotation marks) are a seemingly unnecessary inconvenience.
As a personal anecdote, I was an early adopter of smartphones (particularly relative to a non-technical audience). So I was excited when I could speak to my phone, then disappointed when I discovered that I had to structure my queries and instructions very carefully.
A few years ago I was on a road trip with a very non-technical friend. We decided to stop for Chipotle. Had it been up to me, I would probably have pulled out my phone, opened Google Assistant (or perhaps Maps directly), and told my phone (speaking as clearly as possible) "navigate to the closest Chipotle" or something similar.
But I was driving, so she just pulled out her iPhone and half-shouted "I want a burrito!" at it. And that worked just fine.
Point being, I had expectations for how things should work based on interactions with earlier iterations of an interface. She didn't.
I totally take your point, but I don't think it's inconsistent with mine.
Search engines being 'about' a concept isn't a new thing. Bewlew's book from 2008 is called "Finding Out About". The dream is that the search engine can work out what a document is about, and what I'm thinking about based on the content of the document / query, and match them up.
The new thing in your example is that Google has gone beyond documents into burrito restauraunts, but it's not such a huge leap.
Maybe new adavances have brought new algorithms that are somehow better at finding and modelling those abstractions so the search engine is no longer a recognisable vector space model with predictable proxies. Even if that _is_ the case, they should be able to answer a query I have made, on my own terms.
While there is some truth that we are trained by the search paradigm we learned on, Google has a habit of ignoring key parts of my query just to show results. If I search for something like: spotmatic f schematic (which I did just recently), I don't want it to ignore "schematic" just because there are no matching results. It is far more useful to me to know that there are no matching hits that to make me click several links before I realize none will have what I want (in this case Google doesn't even do me the courtesy of telling me that it is dropping "schematic" from the search, or at least changing it into a word that doesn't return schematics.)
> If you think of Google as a search engine, and particularly if you have historical experience with (and expectations of) search engines, this is very frustrating. And the workarounds of clicking the "must contain" link (or surrounding all of your search terms with quotation marks) are a seemingly unnecessary inconvenience.
Google really needs to develop a "pro mode" search engine that works for this use case. I get the need for an "answers engine" for less savvy users and more casual use cases, but it's a massive company. It can afford to execute two products in its core competency (rather than umpteen messaging apps that it will kill, along with a lot of other useless and/or doomed stuff).
"Google really needs to" in the sense that it would be useful, or that it would be a good investment for them? Sure it can afford to do it, but how would it help them make more money?
> Sure it can afford to do it, but how would it help them make more money?
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It keeps the power users on the site so they wont have to look for an alternative. Power users if they find something better might influence no power users to the other site
> And the workarounds of clicking the "must contain" link (or surrounding all of your search terms with quotation marks) are a seemingly unnecessary inconvenience.
"Google knows better than you" gives way too much credit IMHO. Google Search is nearly useless for my most searched topics today, and even dangerous in that it gives you a very wrong perception of what is out there.
Any examples? I find it hard to believe it is "nearly useless for most searched topics". It is easy to check, go to your search history and look at your last 10-20 queries and count how many them useless.
I just searched for TPUG on Google in both my logged in profile, as well as an incognito window. Both searches returned primarily results about the Toronto PET Users Group, including a knowledge panel specifically about the Toronto PET Users Group (founded in 1978 by Lyman Duggan).
That's either very quick turnaround to fix, or a deeper mystery!
No mystery at all. Google tailors the results to what it thinks you want, rather than what you asked for.
Two people sitting at machines next to each other can perform the same search and get different results. It's what Google's spent billions of dollars on.
I figured it was due to the user base of 2019 being very different than that of 2010, and Google adapting to the fact that most of their users aren't technology literate and cannot formulate clear search queries, so they just try to guess what might be of interest to them.
Absolutely. Scale and diversity applies not only to ingested documents but users. I'm under no illusions that Google has said "here are a chunk of users who may want precise search, at a cost of X, but this other demographic can bring us revenue Y".
That's fine, it's their business, but it makes the virtual monopoly even more painful.
Sure but it would be nice to see DDG add a trivial usability feature like limiting search to the recent year before expecting them to address more challenging initiatives.
It's also that after bootstrapping with text search and page rank, they can incorporate a lot more useful signals in there ranking algorithm: the clickstream on the search results, and page visit time after the click. If the majority of their user base would actually want precise search, this clickstream would not reorder the results, but it does. So most users are happier with imprecise ranking.
The wealth of user traffic is also what no other search engine can replicate, due to Google's market share in web searches.
Idk, from what I've seen, page rank is still the super major factor that's responsible for 90%+ percent. I work for a few large affiliate projects. Renting subdirs on high-link-count-sites = instant top 3 for anything, even the most competitive keys, even when it's totally unrelated to the site's other content. The whole "we have more than 200 factors" seems like mostly hot air to me personally.
It's not necessarily about ranking sites which actually contain the key, or which google already decided should be relevant to the search (where page rank seems to be the most relevant factor, thanks for your interesting data point!).
When Google receives a search query, it first broadens the search phrase (see [0]). The user's clickstream and search refinements are helpful in both training the model for doing the broadening, and then weighting the search contexts, for narrowing down what should actually be displayed on the front pages.
Ah, that's interesting and does explain a bit, thank you.
Might the perceived quality decrease be based on a misclassification of the user entering the search, and therefore a problematic refinement? I'm thinking similar to Amazon's recommendation engine that for some reason (I'd wager my terribe fashion sense) has decided I'm likely a women and now gets most recommendations completely wrong.
> Might the perceived quality decrease be based on a misclassification of the user entering the search
Exactly! Search engine performance can be assessed by measuring precision and recall [0]. Full text search engines have really high precision. Additionally, when the user has been socialized with full text searches, they've built a model of how the search engine works ("it will find documents which contain my search phrase"), so false negatives are perceived to be less severe, as they can be readily explained by the model. "Ah, this document about helicopers contains 'Apache', no wonder it's in the results. I'll add 'webserver' to narrow it down" (And experienced users will already start off with all necessary key terms).
While full text search engines have high precision, they also have bad recall. This can be improved, but there is a tradeoff when tuning the algorithm: to increase recall, the search context is broadened. That necessarily decreases precision as well, because there is no way the search engine is always correct when adding context. Also, when at first all documents on the frontpage at least contained the search term, now there is not even a good explanation why some documents were retrieved. And the more precise the query itself (something we learned by using full text searches) the higher the probability of misclassification, and the worse the effects of broadening. The relevant results are somewhere in the list, but now every second result on the frontpage is from the wrong bucket. And with no explanation, those false positives weight heavy for us users from the old days.
[0] Precision is the probability that a random document in the result set is relevant. Recall is the probability that a random relevant document is in the result set.
does it work well if you put the individual words in quotes? It seems to rank popularity above exact match, and a word in quotes forces it to be present.
Words in quotes aren't always present IME, nor even if you click the "must include" link below the individual result (which rewrites the search statement by adding quotes).
There are products that do a precise search on large datasets, like Westlaw and LexisNexis searches for legal research. Of course, services like these can charge around $100 per query or more, though I’m not sure of their specific rates.
"Google regularly fails to include all words I searched (even if it's only three or four), often retrieving completely useless results. I doubt it's due to incompetence; I take it as a signal that they're now struggling to match the volume and characteristics of the data they have to ingest to an adequate user experience."
That is awfully generous of you ...
Google shows us what it shows us to maximize advertising revenue. They need you to keep clicking and generate hits on adwords-encumbered websites. Showing you zero (or one or a handful of) results for your search query is counter to this goal.
Showing you a batch of results with no adwords-encumbered sites in it is also counter to this goal.
I don't think they're struggling with anything at all - they are optimizing for paid clicks and precise search results is, at best, a very distant second priority...
They used to behave in Google as you describe and it was quite reliable. But somewhere along the line, Google changed how it handles search expressions (for the worse, in my opinion).
Have you tried searching with verbatim mode? Also, keep in mind that google removed the + operator, but you can achieve the same results using double quotation.
Have you tried searching with verbatim mode? Without Verbatim mode, Google will try to be smart, eg match car when you search automotive, making spelling corrections, etc. Also, keep in mind that google removed the + operator, but you can achieve the same results using double quotation.
Google changed the operators; now it's double quotes instead of plus (it was changed for google+ so that the plus searches g+ profiles and pages). You now have to search:
"noir" "film" -"pinot noir"
I wonder whether they'll revert back now that google+ is dead.
I know gmail is different than search, but if you do a quoted search for a string in gmail that has zero matches, it will return a few "close" matches.
This really confused me, because I was trying to find something specific, and it found a few emails, so I read them, and then was confused that they didn't actually take about the specific thing I was trying to remember. Then I realized that they I included one of the words from my string.
In this case, a close match was completely useless, and ended up wasting my time reading irrelevant results. A message saying "we didn't find that, but here's a few close matches" would have been more helpful and avoided wasting my time.
The reasons in this thread about non precise search results are half the reason I stopped using Google Search about a year ago. I get why they've done it, but I don't like it.
I try to wean myself off Google search every few months but I've never managed to stick. What do you like for an alternative? I'm probably due another attempt.
This happened to me just this week! I was trying to find a specific Onion article, so I searched various permutations, many of them including "the onion" which wasn't respected in the result output. I was absolutely furious that the one escape hatch I have to ameliorate bad searches was taken away from me.
Give it a try - I run CookieAutoDelete so it is 'theoretically' a clean search each time if that makes any difference.
Are you saying that it was returning pages that didn't contain the phrase "the onion", or just weren't articles from The Onion? What was the exact search term?
I don't know whether this is necessarily the cause of your issue, but I discovered one reason why it doesn't always work. On mobile Safari, iOS ends up inserting smart quote characters rather than straight quotes when you type them. Google ends up ignoring the smart quote characters. To work around this, I have to hold down the " button to explicitly make the keyboard insert the straight quote character.
It's more noticeable for niche topics, which google tends to struggle with in general.
I remember trying to google something about Sufism and its relationship to mysticism and the occult...and google brought up a bunch of results from right wing conspiracy websites claiming that Islam was related to the "New World Order".
Google appears to respect the quotes for me. Changing the example query above to `"film" "noir" -"film noir"` returns results that mention noir films but not the phrase "film noir". However, searching for `film noir -"film noir"` without quotes on the individual words does return a Netflix page titled "Film Noir".
My first job in high school was adapting altavista into an interface for an internal government parts procurement tool (thrilling, right?). The Boolean operators let us use altavista kind of like a database layer: we offered a cartoony interface that build queries behind the scenes that hit existing parts specification documents - eliminating a giant data structuring and reentry problem.
It was my first exposure to how much work could be saved by working efficiently with unstructured data! Of course, Google took this to a whole other level, realizing that for common users queries themselves should be treated as unstructured data! Learning as much as you can from how people already express themselves is one way to write the future, it turns out...
Ca. 1996 we implemented ad blocking Altavista in our corporate net through DNS rewrites because the ads were already annoying back then. Comparatively small but also with comparatively low bandwidth.
I remember having to use all those meta search engines that combined the results of several engines together to average out all the trash of each result set, and then Google appeared and was better than that.
Vividly remember why AltaVista failed -- they monetized way TOO QUICKLY. Everyone was griping about its sluggishness. Then a few months later a friend pointed me to this new google.com thingy, with its minimalist page, and no ads!
Everyone still names their crap like this. "Dell Optiplex 7010" or "Nvidia GeForce GTX 1060 GTI RTX ETC ETC" gives me absolutely zero information about the product other than what to google.
I'd like to see the source code for Altavista released to the Computer History Museum. I think it is of historical significance. If anyone knows who currently has that code, please post a comment. I think there is a lot to learn from examining old computer code.
A case of Baader-Meinhof today: I was reading about AltaVista an hour or so before this was posted. (Hyperlink trail: DARPA's Memex -> Memex -> Paul Flaherty)
The main reason I started using Altavista was because it was faster. I don't know why this wasn't mentioned in the article, it was one of main points of the Altavista architecture.
We probably can't appreciate it because Google is truly FAST and we are spoiled by it. But the alternative search engines were slow, slow, slow.
I still remember exactly the day a friend of mine called me, saying: “There is this new search engine, it’s so much cleaner than Altavista, and better, it jus has a strange name: google”
O yeah, the early days of online translation were . . . interesting. Especially fun was bidirectional translation (i.e., english -> german -> english, etc.).
I can't comment on how accurate translation is, but I'd say the field has come far as you can now hold up your phone to a bunch of text and get real time translation. You can also use an app to get real time speech recognition plus translation.
I remember using babelfish as a way of sometimes getting around my high school's internet filter. I don't remember exactly why/how it worked, and it didn't always work, but it was fun when it did.
Same! It worked because BabelFish would 'translate' an entire website for you. So if you set it to `Spanish=>English` and then entered an english language URL, it would proxy all the content 'converted' with no real changes.
There was a way to embed maps in a web page and provide a bunch of points of interest to overlay on the map.
Metricom was using it to provide coverage maps of their pole top box locations, for their spread spectrum wireless mesh radio network (it was rolled out in the Bay Area around 1994-1996 or so).
I remember being impressed by how cool and powerful (and generous) it was for one web site like Xerox PARC's map viewer to provide dynamic map rendering services for other web sites like Ricochet's network coverage map!
Then a decade later, along came Google Maps in 2005.
A particularly innovative use of the map service is the U.S. Gazeteer WWW service created by Brandon Plewe [Plew1]. It integrates an existing Geographic Name Server with the PARC Map Viewer. A user simply enters a search query (e.g. the name of a city, county, lake, state or zip code) and a list of matching places is returned as a formatted HTML document. Selecting from the list generates another HTML document consisting of two maps (small and large scale) with the location highlighted (using the Map Viewer's mark option). The server in New York does not generate or retrieve the map images, since they are references directly to the HTTP server at Xerox PARC. The user's WWW browser retrieves the map images from the server in California and displays the complete document to the user.
/mark=latitude,longitude,mark_type,mark_size
place a mark on the map. ",mark_type" (1..7) and ",mark_size" (in pixels) are optional. multiple marks can be separated by ";" (see example below).
/map/color/mark=37.40,-122.14;21.35,-157.97
Specifies marks for Palo Alto, California and Pearl Harbor, Hawaii.
I was delighted to discover that the translations weren't always symmetrical, with the best example being going from English to German then back to English with:
And they had an amazing forum, I remember learning Photoshop there and reverse engineering with a group called FFF (Does anything remember a guy with the mr clean profile pic, Mr. X i think..?). Then they decided to redesign the forum and everyone left.
The approach that Altavista took didn't scale with web growth. It was based on the idea of database searching, where the engine was supposed to return all pages that matched a query. This meant that you couldn't expect to type a generic term and get a useful result; you'd be overwhelmed with random pages. You could find pages that contained an exact phrase, and this could be useful for finding out what some error message means. But as the web exploded in size, the results you could easily get from Altavista got worse and worse; you could fight by adding more and more qualifiers to filter out what you didn't want, but junk results were mixed in with good results.
That's why Yahoo had a business: search engines were of limited use pre-Google, so you needed a hand-curated list to find the good stuff on the web.
Google was first to figure out an effective algorithm to rank results by quality. People immediately stepped in to try to game the system with link farms, junk tags and the like, but even so, it was a revolution.
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[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 281 ms ] threadGoogle changed the world. What used to be buried on the 3rd or 4th page of Altavista results, if it appeared at all, was suddenly front and center. (Yahoo’s directory was rarely useful at all.)
I’m not a fan of Google today, but for years I would tell everyone I knew about it.
(Edit: fixed the year.)
I say this because I’ve been wondering if we now have a Google snapshot of the web instead of AOLs homepage. Don’t get me wrong search is much better than a more or less static homepage of topics.
Are we all in a Google search bubble?
It just sounded so much like the old AOL Keyword feature, which a lot of people forgot about, but was literally often advertised on TV or radio as how to get to a given site or web feature.
The only thing I think is really wrong with search (and all major search engines right now are guilty of this) is making paid ads look very similar to real results, which makes it possible to pay to hijack a result.
I can't remember that happening in years with Google. Now, it's unusual if the thing I'm searching for even appears in the first page.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RealNames
We're definitely in a Google bubble. It becomes very clear that they have intense control over what shows up on the first page of searches, especially in their Featured Snippets and Carousels at the top, and their native-looking ad results.
Control over search results is incredibly powerful in terms of anything from influencing the zeitgeist, to controlling marketing efforts at a grand scale, through to straight propaganda.
We really run an incredible risk as a society by putting too many eggs into the Google basket. Using their browser to use their service to consume their results means a complete monoculture; and while they're not really visibly abusing it now, it's clear that they can subtly manipulate things for a long time before they get caught, and they have the platform to be able to do far more should they (or any government actor forcing their hand) decide they want to.
Gradually they became invasive and overwhelming.. to the point that I have a slight anxiety regarding anything Google in the news.
Back in those days, I was a fan on the Yahoo! directory approach. The web was still small and explore-able, so a directory actually was useful if you didn't actually know what you were specifically looking for.
Meanwhile, if I did know what I was looking for, AltaVista gave me endless pages of random links that were only vaguely related to my search query. I don't think I ever found myself liking it much.
Neither did I! And I'm a bit humored to see other people pronounced it like that too :) I wonder what causes it, regional dialect or something? I'm part-Mexican, grew up bilingual and it just sort of happened without thinking about it, I discovered 'warez', immediately pronounced it "Juarez" (without the Spanish jota inflection) and it took 30 years (today) to learn it's 'wares'.
It was just 56k. I seem to recall back in the day people appended the ".6" for no apparent reason other than it sorta seemed logical after we had 14.4k, 28.8k, 33.6k, and then.. all of a sudden.. 56k.
(and, if I recall correctly, for technical reasons it was really only 52k, and even then, only if you were lucky, usually it was less.
I seem to recall that the equipment was theoretically capable of 56k but in actual implementation, even a perfect POTS system wouldn't do over 52k, and in the real world, it would usually negotiate lower due to distance from CO, quality and number of connections and equipment in between, etc).
Google was a big step afterwards, showing that even when you know what you want, you might not express it correctly, so having some ranking on results was helpful.
I honestly didn't expect Google to have survived the dot-com bust back then. This was before they figured out online adword auctions.
So, funny thing: Back then, if one search engine didn't have what you were looking for, you would try another. Now, if Google doesn't have what you are looking for, where do you go? Does it mean the answer does not exist on the Internet? Do you try Bing or Duck?
https://www.quora.com/How-is-the-Bing-API-used-by-DuckDuckGo
There are effectively only two competitive search engines in the U.S. and European markets today. In those markets, Bing is the only market pressure keeping Google honest.
It was probably subjective but IMO google wasn't better initially, but it did end up being the best. Even tho I use bing or ddg, Google still has the best search engine.
That's why I moved from Altavista to Google. Google had a minimalist homepage and results page which were focussed and loaded very quickly compared to the bloated pages (for the time) of Altavista and Yahoo.
Between AV and InfoSeek (which I used the Netscape plugin to get a browser search bar for) I was seeing better results than Google until sometime in the mid-00's.
Sure if you wanted to skim the surface of what was available on a given topic or just wanted the most popular links, Google was fine in the 90's and early 00's; But if you were deep diving or wanted something more obscure you needed other search engines.
That said, being a nerd of a certain age range, I saw "digital.com" and I got very excited about something I didn't get when I actually clicked on the link ...
Not sure without a bit more digging whether they honor explicit rules for their crawler.
Edit: (but a little looking at comments indicates that they don't, and notes that ia_archiver is Alexa, not the Internet Archive)
+noir +film -"pinot noir"
https://scholar.google.com/
(Edit: scale and diversity of input data but also audiences)
Google regularly fails to include all words I searched (even if it's only three or four), often retrieving completely useless results. I doubt it's due to incompetence; I take it as a signal that they're now struggling to match the volume and characteristics of the data they have to ingest to an adequate user experience.
For a large number of people, Google's ability to answer the underlying question, rather than explicitly identify pages where all search terms appear, means it works better. If you think of Google as a way to get answers, this is good.
If you think of Google as a search engine, and particularly if you have historical experience with (and expectations of) search engines, this is very frustrating. And the workarounds of clicking the "must contain" link (or surrounding all of your search terms with quotation marks) are a seemingly unnecessary inconvenience.
As a personal anecdote, I was an early adopter of smartphones (particularly relative to a non-technical audience). So I was excited when I could speak to my phone, then disappointed when I discovered that I had to structure my queries and instructions very carefully.
A few years ago I was on a road trip with a very non-technical friend. We decided to stop for Chipotle. Had it been up to me, I would probably have pulled out my phone, opened Google Assistant (or perhaps Maps directly), and told my phone (speaking as clearly as possible) "navigate to the closest Chipotle" or something similar.
But I was driving, so she just pulled out her iPhone and half-shouted "I want a burrito!" at it. And that worked just fine.
Point being, I had expectations for how things should work based on interactions with earlier iterations of an interface. She didn't.
Search engines being 'about' a concept isn't a new thing. Bewlew's book from 2008 is called "Finding Out About". The dream is that the search engine can work out what a document is about, and what I'm thinking about based on the content of the document / query, and match them up.
The new thing in your example is that Google has gone beyond documents into burrito restauraunts, but it's not such a huge leap.
Maybe new adavances have brought new algorithms that are somehow better at finding and modelling those abstractions so the search engine is no longer a recognisable vector space model with predictable proxies. Even if that _is_ the case, they should be able to answer a query I have made, on my own terms.
Google really needs to develop a "pro mode" search engine that works for this use case. I get the need for an "answers engine" for less savvy users and more casual use cases, but it's a massive company. It can afford to execute two products in its core competency (rather than umpteen messaging apps that it will kill, along with a lot of other useless and/or doomed stuff).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P2vkiLHiTcY
It keeps the power users on the site so they wont have to look for an alternative. Power users if they find something better might influence no power users to the other site
Plus, they're inadequate.
Google returned exactly ZERO results about TPUG. All of the results were about dogs.
That's either very quick turnaround to fix, or a deeper mystery!
Two people sitting at machines next to each other can perform the same search and get different results. It's what Google's spent billions of dollars on.
I figured it was due to the user base of 2019 being very different than that of 2010, and Google adapting to the fact that most of their users aren't technology literate and cannot formulate clear search queries, so they just try to guess what might be of interest to them.
That's fine, it's their business, but it makes the virtual monopoly even more painful.
The wealth of user traffic is also what no other search engine can replicate, due to Google's market share in web searches.
When Google receives a search query, it first broadens the search phrase (see [0]). The user's clickstream and search refinements are helpful in both training the model for doing the broadening, and then weighting the search contexts, for narrowing down what should actually be displayed on the front pages.
[0] https://www.link-assistant.com/news/keyword-refinements.html
Exactly! Search engine performance can be assessed by measuring precision and recall [0]. Full text search engines have really high precision. Additionally, when the user has been socialized with full text searches, they've built a model of how the search engine works ("it will find documents which contain my search phrase"), so false negatives are perceived to be less severe, as they can be readily explained by the model. "Ah, this document about helicopers contains 'Apache', no wonder it's in the results. I'll add 'webserver' to narrow it down" (And experienced users will already start off with all necessary key terms).
While full text search engines have high precision, they also have bad recall. This can be improved, but there is a tradeoff when tuning the algorithm: to increase recall, the search context is broadened. That necessarily decreases precision as well, because there is no way the search engine is always correct when adding context. Also, when at first all documents on the frontpage at least contained the search term, now there is not even a good explanation why some documents were retrieved. And the more precise the query itself (something we learned by using full text searches) the higher the probability of misclassification, and the worse the effects of broadening. The relevant results are somewhere in the list, but now every second result on the frontpage is from the wrong bucket. And with no explanation, those false positives weight heavy for us users from the old days.
[0] Precision is the probability that a random document in the result set is relevant. Recall is the probability that a random relevant document is in the result set.
No.
That is awfully generous of you ...
Google shows us what it shows us to maximize advertising revenue. They need you to keep clicking and generate hits on adwords-encumbered websites. Showing you zero (or one or a handful of) results for your search query is counter to this goal.
Showing you a batch of results with no adwords-encumbered sites in it is also counter to this goal.
I don't think they're struggling with anything at all - they are optimizing for paid clicks and precise search results is, at best, a very distant second priority...
[0] https://searchenginewatch.com/sew/news/2126346/google-introd...
afaik putting a term in double quotes does the same thing but I am unsure if the implementation is really the same, the effect seems to be
I can't. The plus operator meant the the word you applied it to must be in the search result. Quoting the word does not do this for me.
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/BzmnXJICYAEGqQ7.jpg
"noir" "film" -"pinot noir"
I wonder whether they'll revert back now that google+ is dead.
This really confused me, because I was trying to find something specific, and it found a few emails, so I read them, and then was confused that they didn't actually take about the specific thing I was trying to remember. Then I realized that they I included one of the words from my string.
In this case, a close match was completely useless, and ended up wasting my time reading irrelevant results. A message saying "we didn't find that, but here's a few close matches" would have been more helpful and avoided wasting my time.
The reasons in this thread about non precise search results are half the reason I stopped using Google Search about a year ago. I get why they've done it, but I don't like it.
I either use duckduckgo or google in another browser that I don't normally use.
Give it a try - I run CookieAutoDelete so it is 'theoretically' a clean search each time if that makes any difference.
I remember trying to google something about Sufism and its relationship to mysticism and the occult...and google brought up a bunch of results from right wing conspiracy websites claiming that Islam was related to the "New World Order".
It was my first exposure to how much work could be saved by working efficiently with unstructured data! Of course, Google took this to a whole other level, realizing that for common users queries themselves should be treated as unstructured data! Learning as much as you can from how people already express themselves is one way to write the future, it turns out...
Old habits die hard.
Makes you wonder about stuff like Kayak today in the travel space. Is there some better way out there waiting to be found?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vivisimo
I loved the seeming technical excesses of Digital so much. Nothing they did seemed as calm and staid as Cray, Sun or even SGI.
Think about that name - Alpha Server 8400 Turbo Laser
https://www.lycos.com
https://ipfs.io/ipfs/QmQXeXmMMVfPL9Syqgkoo8zLf6noGrSnGFbnetL...
If other IPFS users wants to pin that to distribute the load, that'd be great.
So I searched for ‘Amiga games’. It came back with a screen full of junk.
I looked at my friend and said ‘none of this has anything to do with Amiga games’.
He said no you need to ‘+computer’ ‘-Spanish’.
I said to him, ‘who’s crappy idea was this?’
Needless to say we all got better at booolean searches and Altavista was light years ahead of yahoo.
Google was a welcome change, made the internet a cool place for about 10 years.
> (hardware) up to: 12 64bit 350MHz processor, 14GB RAM, 39TB storage
220 hits/s dynamic content on that is _very_ impressive.
We probably can't appreciate it because Google is truly FAST and we are spoiled by it. But the alternative search engines were slow, slow, slow.
babelfish.altavista.com, anyone remember that?
The Babelfish being Douglas Adams' fictional fish that you stuck in your ear to use as a universal translator.
there was also a fake domain called alta-vista.com that was very much of the goatse variety.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xerox_PARC_Map_Viewer
There was a way to embed maps in a web page and provide a bunch of points of interest to overlay on the map.
Metricom was using it to provide coverage maps of their pole top box locations, for their spread spectrum wireless mesh radio network (it was rolled out in the Bay Area around 1994-1996 or so).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ricochet_(Internet_service)
I remember being impressed by how cool and powerful (and generous) it was for one web site like Xerox PARC's map viewer to provide dynamic map rendering services for other web sites like Ricochet's network coverage map!
Then a decade later, along came Google Maps in 2005.
Also:
http://www2.parc.com/istl/projects/www94/mapviewer.html
A particularly innovative use of the map service is the U.S. Gazeteer WWW service created by Brandon Plewe [Plew1]. It integrates an existing Geographic Name Server with the PARC Map Viewer. A user simply enters a search query (e.g. the name of a city, county, lake, state or zip code) and a list of matching places is returned as a formatted HTML document. Selecting from the list generates another HTML document consisting of two maps (small and large scale) with the location highlighted (using the Map Viewer's mark option). The server in New York does not generate or retrieve the map images, since they are references directly to the HTTP server at Xerox PARC. The user's WWW browser retrieves the map images from the server in California and displays the complete document to the user.
Documentation:
https://web.archive.org/web/20080621011940/http://www2.parc....
FAQ:
https://web.archive.org/web/20080420130346/http://www2.parc....
Details:
https://web.archive.org/web/20080608142726/http://www2.parc....
/mark=latitude,longitude,mark_type,mark_size place a mark on the map. ",mark_type" (1..7) and ",mark_size" (in pixels) are optional. multiple marks can be separated by ";" (see example below).
/map/color/mark=37.40,-122.14;21.35,-157.97 Specifies marks for Palo Alto, California and Pearl Harbor, Hawaii.
I was delighted to discover that the translations weren't always symmetrical, with the best example being going from English to German then back to English with:
"I'm going to kick your ass"
-->
"I will step on your donkey"
The name always amused me, partly as a homage to the Terminator franchise, and partly Altavista.
That's why Yahoo had a business: search engines were of limited use pre-Google, so you needed a hand-curated list to find the good stuff on the web.
Google was first to figure out an effective algorithm to rank results by quality. People immediately stepped in to try to game the system with link farms, junk tags and the like, but even so, it was a revolution.