AltaVista The Search Company (2001)

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Embarrassed_Spell_28@reddit

https://preview.redd.it/xzcsvcgx8bcc1.jpeg?width=244&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=bc0408d6b4b1a93eab8ccd6940ea48ec3d5d79ea

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ahoypolloi_@reddit

Who remember babelfish, the proto web language translator that altavista launched?

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IAmJohnny5ive@reddit

When you translated and then translated back you landed up with about 50% gibberish.

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Main_Half_2290@reddit

Altavista was a very good search engine. Also the [babelfish.altavista.com](https://babelfish.altavista.com) for translations was way ahead.

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I used dejanews a ton as it was like adding reddit to a google search string. I used it so much I emailed them and said why not let people tag date ranges or newsgroups in the search box. Instead of using the long advanced search screen. and they implemented it!

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junkmm3@reddit

I was more of a Lycos kinda guy tbh

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pop5656@reddit

Memory unlocked

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frownyface@reddit

For awhile Hotbot was the best, then Lycos bought them and killed off their search engine team and replaced it with Lycos search results. It's truly baffling the shit internet companies do to kill themselves.

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itsasnowconemachine@reddit

For nerds: "As of 1998, it used 20 multi-processor machines using DEC's 64-bit Alpha processor. Together, the back-end machines had 130 GB of RAM and 500 GB of hard disk drive space, and received 13 million queries every day"

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Checktheusernombre@reddit

So my phone is more powerful than AltaVista

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itsasnowconemachine@reddit

If your phone has 130GB of RAM, that's impressive! But yeah, interesting question. Raw CPU speed, I'd guess the phone has more. 500GB of storage isn't a big deal for a phone anymore. It's SSD vs spinning disks, spread out over a bunch of different controllers, but I'd imagine IO/second would still be more. @ 13 million 'queries per day' is ~150 requests / second. Could a modern phone simultaneously do web-crawling, indexing, responding to db queries, and take web requests (of the web the size it was in the late 90s) at that rate? Hopefully somebody more nerdy and informed than I will answer that. ( I should've just said "no", and waited to be corrected :)

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Checktheusernombre@reddit

You're probably right, I'd say likely no too, but it's probably close. The fact that it even can be close is wild to me.

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itsasnowconemachine@reddit

Yeah, tech is pretty crazy. I want somebody to do the math, or literally find the alta-vista source code, and port it to iOS/Android and try it.

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SomberGuitar@reddit

This should be at the top.

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MaintenanceTraining4@reddit

Shoutout to Netscape girlies

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Itsagirlyslope@reddit

There are literally tens of us! ![gif](giphy|lORulWik72L7O)

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itsasnowconemachine@reddit

Ah, the glorious Netscape 'throbber'. "And the beast shall come forth surrounded by a roiling cloud of vengeance. The house of the unbelievers shall be razed and they shall be scorched to the earth. Their tags shall blink until the end of days." — from The Book of Mozilla, 12:10

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Itsagirlyslope@reddit

Love it 🤣🤣

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itsasnowconemachine@reddit

As a Netscape Girlie (former employee?) I assume you get the reference, but just in case, the Book of Mozilla stuff is a quote from an Easter Egg from Netscape about:mozilla, nothing I wrote.

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Taossmith@reddit

This and Webcrawler were my favorites

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EntertainmentRare697@reddit

That was my go to search engine!

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ceruleanmoon7@reddit

I was a yahoo! girl

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bill_wessels@reddit

oh man brings back memories. ask jeeves was also a thing

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ceruleanmoon7@reddit

They had ads on tv for Ask Jeeves!

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SilverDem0n@reddit

AltaVista was by far the most effective search engine for a year or so before Google launched, and then it was game over. AltaVista just couldn't cope with the SEO-ing, which was pretty trivial by today's standards but trashed the search results effectively. And now of course the same can be said of Google and SEO. I loved the high information density of that era. Yes, computer screens were small and low-res by modern standards, but popular websites didn't just pad everything out with acres of useless whitespace for a e s t h e t i c s.

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drc500free@reddit

Instead, they padded it with acres of whitespace that was actually white-on-white search term spam!

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itsasnowconemachine@reddit

This. and MBs of Javascript. (from 2016) "The Average Webpage Is Now the Size of the Original Doom" https://www.wired.com/2016/04/average-webpage-now-size-original-doom/

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prairieaquaria@reddit

It was my go-to in college.

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FunRabbit4652@reddit

I never really used Alta-Vista growing up. I preferred excite.com instead.

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rearwindowpup@reddit

You could buy the software to run a pay per click search engine for like 20 bucks on Ebay in the very early 2000s. I had my own search engine for like 6 months that made me tens of dollars. Freaking epic.

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actionerror@reddit

Remember when web search engines were bad?

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thejunkmanadv@reddit

I remember. It was yesterday. Google is getting worse at serving relevant search results that aren't trying to just sell you something.

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sunplaysbass@reddit

Google was way better several years ago

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boyerizm@reddit

It has been a trip to watch the evolution from Gopher/Telnet to AOL to an internet that has mostly become a cesspool of pop-up ads and forms to fill out. And now, with AI, we don’t even need to know anything!

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mechanical_zombie@reddit

That day is today! Bing only give me links to sites selling me stuff ans google to sponsored sht and AI generated sites

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Cake_And_Pi@reddit

Why does everyone in this town use altavista?

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Knightelfontheshelf@reddit

Alta Vista used boolean logic and that helped so much. This was my goto.

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Shortbus_Playboy@reddit

I was Team MetaCrawler

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Independent-Ad-6750@reddit

ineverwon.com

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MaxPower836@reddit

Looks great. Very clean landing 🥴

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spsanderson@reddit

Windows IE 6 search bars anyone?

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xion_gg@reddit

Do you mean the 20 search bars and the leftover 3" of screen?

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spsanderson@reddit

Yes

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srslyjmpybrain@reddit

And I love Parks and Rec for their callout: “Why does everyone in this town use AltaVista? Is it 1997?” -Ben Wyatt, Human Disaster (per the chyron) in 2009

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trexhatespushups42@reddit

I miss AltaVista. And my GeoCities page(s).

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saskies17@reddit

Lycos for the win

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ScreenTricky4257@reddit

Astalavista the pirate software company.

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Dazslueski@reddit

Common user of Alta vista and for awhile, askjeeves. Aj.

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Harlockarcadia@reddit

I prefer Hotbot myself

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Correct_Toe_4628@reddit

Now do Excite!

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johnnloki@reddit

Excitechat

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itsmostlyamixedbag@reddit

this was my go to search engine

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SomberGuitar@reddit

Hey! All of my web apps look like that!

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Johnykbr@reddit

I worked for them in high school when they were still high on the list. I felt like a baller making 8 dollars an hour.

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odenihy@reddit

It was good, but no Lycos.

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actionerror@reddit

No HotBot either

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mybadalternate@reddit

There’s my boy! HotBot was the shit!

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Jupiter68128@reddit

AltaVista was the bomb! Way better than Excite!

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MartialBob@reddit

I was a big Lycos fan back in highschool. I even used their email service, mail city.

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snicmtl@reddit

Anybody remember the shady site that piggy backed on the name: 'Astalavista' ? Just realized the word 'warez' never really made it into popular culture, only the expression 'pirate'.

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Ordinary_Aioli_7602@reddit

This was my go-to before Google

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xoxo_erinmarie@reddit

damn, that's a memory unlock right there!

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skamunism@reddit

AltaVista Image Search was tops for a minute there

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FinnsterBaby@reddit

LexusNexus

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VWBug5000@reddit

I preferred Metacrawler, personally

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Khorre@reddit

I miss Webcrawler.

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_acrostical@reddit

I was absolutely using Altavista for the fact-checking internship I had in summer 2000...until a college friend told me she was using this new site called Google.

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Caliphane@reddit

Very popular in Pawnee Indiana

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_acrostical@reddit

"It says you could have network connectivity problems."

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aertimiss@reddit

Babelfish.altavista.com this gem of a translator allowed me to get around those pesky school firewalls. :)

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pimphand5000@reddit

Lycos was my prefer for standard search. Alta Vista more for riding the high seas

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ThrowThisIntoSol@reddit

I'm waiting for [Excite.com](https://Excite.com)

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938h25olw548slt47oy8@reddit

My first favorite search engine was Excite!

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Jonestown_Juice@reddit

One of the cool things about Alta Vista back in the dial up days is that you could basically get free internet from them in exchange for having their search banner on your desktop. It was easy to hide if it bothered you.

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