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▲ tptacek 9 hours ago

Was it ever good?

▲stingraycharles 9 hours ago | parent | next [-]

None of the search engines from that era were really good. AltaVista was perhaps the best, but AskJeeves was up there and people used multiple. AltaVista, AskJeeves, Yahoo, etc. They all had their pros and cons.

Then Google arrived and showed them what a “good” search engine was like.

▲rsync 8 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Altavista was fantastic and represented a features and usability high water mark that was never passed by google.

Full boolean operator search with "literals" actually respected, negative search terms worked as advertised, etc.

None of that ever worked properly, consistently, at google.

▲thayne 8 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> None of that ever worked properly, consistently, at google.

My experience is it worked pretty well on Google for a while, but then it got progressively worse.

▲stingraycharles 7 hours ago | parent [-]

Right, for this first 5 years or so, it worked. But then they started to optimize for “the masses”, and they don’t use boolean logic in queries.

▲toyg 2 hours ago | parent [-]

They optimized for ad impressions. There was no technical reason not to keep around a Boolean mode - some competitors effectively exist because of that single feature.

▲mrandish 8 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Agreed. AltaVista was the best of the pre-Google search engines. I seem to remember Google having negative terms, literals and booleans (at least or/and) - although they weren't well documented, they worked. Amazon had literals and negative terms too for many years. Now searching on both of those sites is "search theater", where they pretend to give targeted results while burying the result you're looking for just deep enough to maximize page views before too many users bounce.

I fucking hate we now live in a world where leading companies A/B test precisely how much they can degrade their core product value and annoy users knowing they're safe from competitors because startups know if they threaten Google/Amazon on that stuff they'll just put back the minimum functionality long enough to ensure the new player dies.

▲akafred 7 hours ago | parent [-]

I pay for kagi on my personal machine, it is always a delight when my cmd-t search is answered kagi and not a list of ads ...

▲seanmcdirmid 8 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I would think that 90% of the principals at DEC/Compaq WRL working on AltaVista would have moved to google, their first office was nearby in downtown Palo Alto back in 1999.

▲zorked 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

It is absolutely insane to say that Altavista was better than Google though.

▲decimalenough 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Try Kagi, it implements them quite well.

▲yread 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

It worked pretty well on early google and altavista. Find an archive of searchlores.org from that era and see for yourself. +Fravia had documented and tested the features quite thoroughly

▲mc32 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I think they also allowed distance between words (within x) to increase relevance.

▲stevekemp 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I cannot read AltaVista without thinking of Astalavista[.box.sk].

▲krater23 an hour ago | parent [-]

Mee to :D

▲bandrami 9 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

And at the time it was still an open question whether search engines or curated oracles like Yahoo would be what stuck in the long term.

▲helterskelter 8 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Around this time you also had meta search engines, which gave you the dedup'd results of all the major search engines at the time. There was MetaCrawler and Dogpile from what I remember, both of which are oddly still around.

▲cm2187 8 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

AltaVista and HotBot for me. Yahoo wasn't a search engine, it was a manually curated website directory (with a hierarchical structure), which was great for finding similar websites if you found one you liked.

▲eduction 8 hours ago | parent [-]

You could get search results on yahoo. The directory results would come first and then search results from their current “partner.” At one point it was Inktomi, the Berkeley company behind HotBot. At one point it was Google. Before them, one of the more generic ones.

▲hdgvhicv 5 hours ago | parent [-]

originally it was directory only, wasn’t until fairly late they adddd an alta vista fallback.

▲tptacek 8 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I remember AltaVista being the only really credible search engine prior to Google (I took a brief detour to Excite but kept going back to AltaVista). Jeeves I only remember for the freeform query gimmick.

▲bsder 8 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

AltaVista had a Java applet that would visualize the "clusters" that a search produced. You could then click on a "cluster" in order to exclude all the irrelevant ones and the search results would update.

For example: Searching on "python" would give you two obvious clusters one for "reptiles" and one for "programming languages". Clicking on the appropriate cluster would screen out all the irrelevant ones.

This is a feature still unmatched by any search engine today.

▲krater23 an hour ago | parent [-]

I've never seen this feature despite using a lot altavista back then. What a pity

▲bsimpson 8 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Don't forget WebCrawler!

▲thr0waway001 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Yahoo was pretty good until they removed comments from their posts as well as removing Yahoo Answers.

I loved the chaos of Yahoo answers.

I remember messed up questions like “Can humans get preggo from midgets” and things of that nature.

▲xnx 6 hours ago | parent [-]

Gregnant?

▲kstrauser 3 hours ago | parent [-]

Pregante!

▲iammrpayments 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I remember vividly how lycos was much better than google

▲kid64 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Nobody remembers Hotbot. Google before Google.

▲xnx 6 hours ago | parent [-]

I remember. Powered by Inktomi.

▲throwatdem12311 8 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

And now every search engine has been flooded with SEO’d AI slop and they all suck again.

▲Zambyte 3 hours ago | parent [-]

Kagi has done a good job of making it easy to cut through slop so far. I never really deal with slop search results

▲DeathArrow 8 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Alta Vista had more relevant search results than Google has now.

▲zombot 7 hours ago | parent [-]

For all practical purposes, internet search is dead or dying. It has been enshittified to perfection by multiple parties. Those who could have been called users in a previous life are the ones getting the least use out of it. For a brief period of time, LLMs can help. Until their inevitable decay into ad-infested hellscapes makes them just as useless. They don't have ad blockers.

▲Barbing 6 hours ago | parent [-]

You hear analysts talk about the majority of corporations being in the infancy of their understanding of language models. Shudder to think of the slop mature players will put out.

▲kwoff 8 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Exactly. Before google came out in I think 1998, I had several bookmarked sites like excite.com, altavista, dogpile, yahoo, and yes askjeeves. You kinda had a feeling for which one would be good for which kind of search. But then google came along...

▲bandrami 9 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Yes. When it came out it was amazing, and it forced the existing search engines to start parsing queries' intents rather than just searching for the words in them.

▲gizajob 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

No not at all.

The whole point of AskJeeves was that you could ask Jeeves things in natural language because the landing page was a snappily dressed butler waiting to help you around the internet, but it didn’t really work so you were left disappointed every time. Still found myself using it because the url was easy to remember though. But then google annihilated it so nobody ever went back, and I guess why they dropped the Jeeves part of the url because he was less than useful.

▲spike021 8 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I very vaguely recall using it right before I started using google. very early 2000s. it was ok.

▲ryukoposting 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

It was my default search engine for my formative years of computer use in the mid-2000s. Google was starting to get better at finding results with matching topics, rather than matching keywords. But it wasn't really there yet, and you'd get some really dumb results sometimes. I found ask.com to be much more predictable.

▲serf 8 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

ask was cool because the appeal initially was to allow people to better form search queries with natural human language questions.

as far as weird search engine traits I still think ChaCha is king; it's just sort of intrinsically funny that another human being is being given two cents to find me the most relevant FarScape fansite or DIY tattoo ink guides, whatever.

▲DANmode 8 hours ago | parent [-]

WAS being given

They’re done.

▲tempaccount5050 8 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I think that and dogpile were the best in that short area before google took off as the clear winner.

▲bfsjjdjdfj 9 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

During those days you were switching between 3-4 different ones to find info. They were maybe good for two weeks where I would use it alot but you always switched around and came back to it.

▲Mistletoe 9 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Yeah I remember using it back in the day and getting good results.

> Unlike early keyword-based engines, it aimed to answer specific questions, acting as a precursor to modern AI assistants like Siri or ChatGPT.

> Ask Jeeves (now Ask.com) was an early search engine launched in 1996 that allowed users to get answers via natural language queries, personified by a cartoon butler mascot. Developed by Garrett Gruener and David Warthen, it focused on Q&A rather than just keywords.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ask.com

▲DANmode 8 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Between ‘97-2000, arguably.