I have a different opinion regarding Altavista search results quality. The results were so bad that most of the times I had to also try Hotbot, Ask Jeeves and various directories (Yahoo, dmoz, etc). They were not good search engines but the web back then was way smaller and there was a high chance that you could have different content on the other engines.

That’s the reason why Google, a very small newcomer, crashed the entire search engine market.