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.

> 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.

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.

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.

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

Try Kagi, it implements them quite well.

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

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