Baldur Bjarnason
Isn't it kind of weird that so few internet history articles on AltaVista don't mention it's spam problem at all?
I mean, as far as I can remember, spam results were the only reason why everybody around me abandoned it for Google as soon as they showed up.
Am I misremembering or has search engine spam been memory-holed somehow?
clacke
Dave
@baldur Besides the spam, I left Altavista for its cluttered interface. It was trying to be a portal when all that ever mattered there were the pages 2 to 10 of the search results...
Baldur Bjarnason
@leonp Is it possible that people didn't realise that the incorrect/irrelevant results in AltaVista were keyword-stuffed spam pages?
Leon Paternoster
@baldur I seem to remember it was simply Google providing brilliant results, and a page that was just a search box. I don't remember spam being an Alta Vista problem (doesn't mean it wasn't, of course).
clacke
Baldur Bjarnason
@j9t I was the kind of nerd teenager who had opinions on search engines back in the late 90s 😁
Jamie McCarthy
@baldur @j9t I didn’t think of the problem as spam, the reason I switched to Google was their results were more what I had been looking for and less what I hadn’t. Alta Vista was still one of the engines whose algorithm was very much based on whether your keywords were on a page. Very simple. Too simple, as it turned out. Maybe spam was at the root of the problem but I remember it just being irrelevance.
Jens Oliver Meiert
@baldur, don’t recall much else from *any* search engine prior to Google
Leon Paternoster
@baldur ha ha, so we just didn't recognise spam? :-) Quite possible.
Could have been less of it about, perhaps? I can't remember when the concept of meta keyword stuffing started, or when search ranking position would have been seen as something that could even be gamed. Probably at the beginning... It'd be interesting to delve into its history.
Baldur Bjarnason
Keyword-stuffing was a day one phenomenon as soon as search engines decided to rank pages according to keyword weights in meta tags.
Lycos, for example, only supported the meta tag for a few months and then dropped it in, what 98?, because it led to irrelevant results.
AltaVista was one of the last engines to drop support and that was IIRC the core reason why its results were useless.
clacke
@jackyan @baldur I don't remember AV having portal stuff. Did they ever have that on altavista.digital.com or only after they registered altavista.com?
The way I remember it I never used av.c, but went straight from av.d.c to google.
Jack Yan (甄爵恩)
@baldur I switched because Google was way faster (and more accurate). AV was also getting bogged down with the portal content IIRC.
It was a shame, as we were an Altavista Entertainment Zone licensor and we got a lot of traffic through that.
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