[radicalbyte]

Google was easily 10x better than any of their competition. It was effectively alone in the market.

Most of us were using 56k modems to access the internet back then, Google's search returned results within a couple of seconds. Yahoo, Lycos, Excite, Alta-Vista were still loading. Then the search results themselves were so good you could often just pick the first result. They eventually added a button which just took you directly to the first result. Which I used.

[bsder]

> Alta-Vista were still loading

Your memory is faulty. AltaVista was always super fast--it never had the advertising bloat that the other ones had until the very end.

The problem AltaVista had was that it didn't scale when the Internet went exponential--so AltaVista would give you good search results until you asked current, topical questions. AltaVista relied on running a single, super-expensive stonking huge Alpha machine while Google ran on lots of commodity servers that spidered constantly.

[BryantD]

This is inaccurate. When I was running AV operations around 2000, we were running on a couple dozen huge Alpha machines for the index layer and queries. We had a bunch of smaller machines for Web serving, and a high memory set of Alphas as a caching layer.

See https://www.usenix.org/legacy/publications/library/proceedin... for the 1997 server count, which was before we got to the three tier architecture.

We also spidered constantly. A couple of those huge backend Alphas were dedicated to holding the constant spider index. AV had a well earned reputation for quick discovery, although I think Google wound up faster. We suffered a bit from maintaining separate indexes for the main corpus and recent pages, and I imagine Google handled that better.

But the period of time when our main index went to hell was the period of time when we failed to do a new main index crawl for several months. I won’t get into why that happened politically because my memory isn’t perfect and I don’t want to criticize anyone who won’t see this to stand up for themselves, but it’s absolutely the case that we let the index get stale.

And I will say that I think the execs were distracted by the idea of challenging Yahoo by buying a shopping site and a local news site of sorts and, unlike the Google of the time, they lacked the wisdom to focus on our primary product.

And now I fade back into the hedges, until the next time AV comes up… I suspect a high percentage of my HN comments are on this exact topic. It makes me sad.

[bsder]

I stand corrected. Thanks for all your work.

And I still miss the AltaVista illustrated diagram (Java Applet) that would allow you to drill down and specialize the search results. No modern search has ever matched that, again.

[BryantD]

It was a fun place to be. Sorry if I came across as curt — rereading that I was a bit more blunt than I intended. Sick cat has been stressing me.

[bsder]

No offense was taken. It's always good to hear from the people who actually did stuff to set the record straight.

> It was a fun place to be.

It was. I was in the hardware side during the Hostile Giveaway(tm) to Intel and Compaq.

Good luck with your cat.

[jhy]

That feature sounds amazing! I tried searching wayback etc but wasn't able to find any more details. Do you happen to know of any screenshots / deeper descriptions for it?

Perhaps we could nerd snipe Marginalia Search to add it :)

[bsder]

I remember it being a Java applet with animations, but my memory could be terribly faulty at this point.

Following your comments and trying to trail things out, the only thing I can find is a reference to AltaVista LiveTopics.

https://dannysullivan.com/why-search-sucks-you-wont-fix-it-t...

I suspect what I used was that "GRAPH" button in the AltaVista Refine picture.

We might want to archive that image. It seems like the only evidence that this stuff ever existed.

[jhy]

Thanks, AltaVista LiveTopics is a good keyword. I found:

https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Alta-Vista-LiveTopic-Gra...

which has some different coverage.

I did try to archive the blog you linked but unfortunately the owner is blocking it with robots.txt

User-agent: ia_archiver Disallow: /

[BobbyTables2]

FWIW, I preferred AltaVista over Google back in the day.

[panick21_]

From the oral history interviews, it seem one of the tricks was keeping the core algorithm in cache completely.

[BryantD]

I was not a software engineer but yeah, I think so. Every now and then we’d have to go get Mike Burrows to do some consulting work to rewrite a bit more of the code in assembly.

[radicalbyte]

Thanks for replying, now I remember why I used to spend all day on this site :-) A lot of the political changes and my exposure to some of the VC people outside of public view have soured tech for me. That and the current cult-like behaviour and clear fraud from the crypto and now AI waves... anyhow, I digress.

We were big AV users initially, I think for 2 years? This was 94-97 so my memory of the time periods is fuzzy. When Google came along I have very vivid memory of it providing not only better search results but also faster loads times.

I wonder if Google was already geo-distributed at the time? Latency was real then, it wasn't uncommon to hit 350ms (compared to 20-50ms to Europe) and the difference would have been felt back then. It was a killer for Counter Strike.

[bparsons]

Webcrawler was faster than both!

[radicalbyte]

No it wasn't. Google had a tiny front page back then, Alta-Vista was visibly slower. Very similar to Excite. All of the others were terrible.

[scoofy]

Yea, that's easy to say now.

I was a relatively early investor (2008), but I was very hesitant early on because Microsoft was building an integrated search function, which became Windows Live Search, which became Bing. I definitely remember it took me to the beginning of the financial crisis to finally decide that it was going nowhere. I suspect it was the development of Google Maps that changed my mind.

[ethbr1]

"Google" of today is really AdSense ($102M, 2003) -> Android ($50M+?, 2005) -> YouTube ($1.6B, 2006) -> Google Docs ($50M+?, 2006)

Without those prescient and lucky acquisitions, we'd be talking about a "Google" that looked much more like Yahoo.

It wasn't search proficiency that built the empire, it was leveraging a transient search quality advantage into cash flow, then plowing that cash into acquisitions to construct a durable moat.

[icedchai]

I remember late 90's, early 2000's Google. Search result quality was still better than the competition (mainly Altavista...)

[ompogUe]

Was on a team that was trying to sell AltaVista a social media presence (before facebook/myspace/etc). Our people were mostly using Google, but we still wanted the client. One of the "moderation experts" on our side (i.e. - not tech or busniess) who evidently didn't understand what AltaVista was about asked them "Why don't you just use Google? It's better".

[ethbr1]

But that only would have lasted until the next search innovation and/or competitors copied Google's indexing.

[icedchai]

There were many search engines around during that time. Yahoo, Excite, Microsoft Live Search, Lycos... I don't recall any of them improving enough to rival early 2000's Google.

[ethbr1]

None of those scaled as quickly as Google in terms of revenue (read: AdSense), and Microsoft lost interest.

[radicalbyte]

Erm 2008 isn't early, I had been using it for almost a decade by then. They had won by 2001. No-one who knew Microsoft thought that they had a chance with Bing. This was post-Gates and Microsoft were already a laughing stock in 2008 with respect to the web.

[vinnymac]

Curious, why do you say that as if the "I'm Feeling Lucky" button isn't still on the homepage in 2026?

[bravoetch]

I couldn't even tell you when I used the Google search page. It's been years at least. I wouldn't be surprised if many other people also don't go there to search. I assume most search straight in the url bar.

[esseph]

Home pages are still a thing are are often set to google

[sunnybeetroot]

Because it’s not there on mobile

[consp]

Because it is useless now.