Dear Googles: Stop asking

Re:Dear Googles: Stop asking by greenyoda on Saturday November 16, 2013 @03:02PM (#6746230)

If I remember correctly, AltaVista had a pretty sophisticated advanced search mode where you could string together search terms with Boolean operators (and/or/not). And I'm sure that AltaVista had some kind of metric of "site quality" before PageRank came along. For example, you could judge how "important" a site is by how often people click on a search result to go there, or how big they are (number of URLs from that site in your search index). You can also rank the relevance of a search result by how closely the search terms match the text on the site.

Also, as the web and search evolved, people who ran web sites figured out what they'd need to do to get found more easily by search engines. It's possible that the rise of SEO was more responsible for a better search experience than improved site ranking algorithms.

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Re:Dear Googles: Stop asking by bad_user on Saturday November 16, 2013 @05:04PM (#6746619)

I was also using AltaVista back in early 2000. Their advanced search method you mention is the perfect example of complicated UI that fails to function properly, putting the blame on the user. I switched to Google after being frustrated that I wasn't finding something while at an Internet Cafe, I then saw Google's logo on somebody else's screen and gave it a try. Google was better by an order of magnitude. Your reasoning about SEO is bulshit.

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Re:Dear Googles: Stop asking by rsync on Sunday November 17, 2013 @01:14AM (#6747829)

... and now we have completely useless and inaccurate results from google just about every time you search.

There isn't an hour that goes by that I don't search for a few keywords ... like ... freebsd openvpn push ... and guess what ? Results 1 and 3 for that query do not contain the word push.

Every day I am running into this and every day I miss altavista.

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Re:Dear Googles: Stop asking by nostrademons on Sunday November 17, 2013 @01:59AM (#6747919)

Try verbatim mode:

https://www.google.com/search?q=freebsd+openvpn+push&tbs=li:...

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Re:Dear Googles: Stop asking by davidgerard on Saturday November 23, 2013 @01:13PM (#6786814)

:-D

Is there a way to switch this on permanently?

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Re:Dear Googles: Stop asking by davidgerard on Saturday November 16, 2013 @03:09PM (#6746258)

I vaguely recall something like a Boolean search functionality on AV, yeah. I think HotBot had one too, though they were using some other sucky algorithmic innovation that didn't actually crack the search problem.

I don't think SEO really started happening until Google outlined the basic idea of PageRank - until there was something to plausibly target. At which point 1999-2000 were the years of hideous link farms. I sure remember those.

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Re:Dear Googles: Stop asking by gaius on Saturday November 16, 2013 @06:09PM (#6746773)

No, it was happening way before Google, every page's meta tags would have "anna kournikova nekkid", even if you were selling lawnmowers.

I was an avid user of AltaVista back in the day but what killed it, and why I jumped on Google as soon as it was available was back then, it was simply less polluted.

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