Published:
Updated:
by Wayne Smith
Several things separate Altavista from other search engines.
- They were the premiere full-page search engine on the internet.
- They operated more like a web archive than any of the alternative search engines.
- They had a serious amount of computer power and storage behind them allowing them to use brute computer power.
The oldest advanced web search page in the web archive is from 2004. Altavista's advanced search dates back to the 1990s.
The terms for the boolean expressions give an idea of how advanced Altavista was -- By using advanced DEC systems they were not limited by computer power.
Yes, that "*" is a wild card, and while Google does have a wild card; Google's wild card operator is limited as a placeholder for a complete word.
The complete list of terms fills more than one webpage. It's a skyscraper page listing ways to mine information published online. As I said, they were not using a network of PCs. In 1998 (more than 20 years ago), it used 20 multi-processor machines using DEC's 64-bit Alpha processors. DEC was their parent company.
For comparison, Windows 98 required a 486 with 16 megabytes of RAM and 120 megabytes of hard drive space.
Scalability
Their index peeked in 2002 with 1,000 million web pages, but for most of its existence was in the 10s of millions of web pages. Their ability to add computer power did not scale as fast as the internet.
Search Engine Optimization
Altavista despite being the premiere full-page search engine didn't attract a lot of attention from the SEO community. Usage was complicated: Altavista may have more tutorials on how to use it than all other search engines combined -- so it did not drive a lot of traffic to websites.
As it did not rank pages with headlines higher than those without; SEO was making sure the keyword was on the page and near other keywords the user may search for.
As it did not have a freshness algorithm ... people would use advanced search to find websites ... being first on the first page did not generate the kind of traffic it did with other search engines. The sites found on the first page rarely changed ... Altavista attracted researchers who would dig deep into the results with the advanced search features.
Keyword Proximity, Evergreen Search Factor
Conceptually keyword proximity as a factor for ranking documents was initially pioneered by Altavista, however, Altavista's implementation of search did not scale with the size of the internet. Hotbot or Inktomi's internet search did and proximity has been a forever algorithm factor in determining relevancy ever since.
While the majority of Altavista's search innovations didn't scale, Keyword proximity could be associated with a query-based index (pulled from trending searches); Allowing the keyword proximity to be pre-calculated into the index. While not as advanced as Altavista's it is scalable.
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