alt Hacker NewsNone 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.
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I cannot read AltaVista without thinking of Astalavista[.box.sk].
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Don't forget WebCrawler!
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.
I remember vividly how lycos was much better than google
Alta Vista had more relevant search results than Google has now.
And now every search engine has been flooded with SEO’d AI slop and they all suck again.
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...
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.