Altavista: The rise and fall of the biggest pre-Google search engine

Re:Altavista: The rise and fall of the biggest pre-Google se... by jandrese on Friday February 15, 2019 @02:06PM (#19173719)

I've long believed that default OR in keyword searches is always a mistake, and the default should always be AND.

The reason being you can just search twice if you want either word, but in the vast majority of cases you want both words when you enter them in the searchbox. Most companies kind of split the difference and put the AND results first then fill in with OR results, but that mostly just leads to "if your answer isn't on the first page, it's not going to be on the second or the hundredth".

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Re:Altavista: The rise and fall of the biggest pre-Google se... by saalweachter on Friday February 15, 2019 @02:30PM (#19173944)

Amazon's "Whatever, here's some products you'll probably buy that are totally unrelated to your search" back-fill has always filled me with rage.

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Re:Altavista: The rise and fall of the biggest pre-Google se... by dukoid on Friday February 15, 2019 @03:07PM (#19174241)

At least there it's obvious... If you search for a product with a specific feature you are easily screwed without noticing until later... :(

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Re:Altavista: The rise and fall of the biggest pre-Google se... by guiambros on Friday February 15, 2019 @03:04PM (#19174220)

I had an ISP at the time, and remember teaching users to always search on AV using "keyword1 AND keyword2", to get the results they expected. When Google came around, this became unnecessary.

IMO this was one of the biggest contributors to the perceived quality advantage of Google vs AV.

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Re:Altavista: The rise and fall of the biggest pre-Google se... by teddyh on Friday February 15, 2019 @06:47PM (#19175865)

> but that mostly just leads to "if your answer isn't on the first page, it's not going to be on the second or the hundredth".

Relevant xkcd about the “second page of Google results” effect:

https://xkcd.com/1334/

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Re:Altavista: The rise and fall of the biggest pre-Google se... by sytelus on Tuesday February 19, 2019 @06:31AM (#19198215)

It’s not always a mistake. The OR or AND just provides initial filter and then you get to rank pages and take top N. If your ranking algorithm put a lot of weight on the fact that all words exist then you can get same result as AND but with benefit that if no page exist then you may suggest something. It also depends on how you present these results.

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