I don't remember stale indexes being a problem with AltaVista, its interesting to hear about that. When I switched to Google, it was because I was reliably finding good results within the first few entries. I'd forgotten about it until now, but it used to be a normal thing to page through several screens of search results - performing some kind of human relevance/ranking task on results that were simply too noisy.

From the article:

> This move away from AltaVista’s streamlined search experience made AltaVista more similar to its competitors. Users gradually began to switch to a newcomer, Google, for the simple search they missed.

I don't think this was the case at all. People switched because they got better results.