In the Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives
by Steven Levy · 12 Apr 2011 · 666pp · 181,495 words
thought of that page, that would be a really valuable thing for search.” The leader in web search at that time was a program called AltaVista that came out of Digital Equipment Corporation’s Western Research Laboratory. A key designer was Louis Monier, a droll Frenchman and idealistic geek who had
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Monier sold them on the public relations aspect. (The system would be a testament to DEC’s powerful new Alpha processing chip.) On launch day, AltaVista had 16 million documents in its indexes, easily besting anything else on the net. “The big ones then had maybe a million pages,” says Monier
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. That was the power of AltaVista: its breadth. When DEC opened it to outsiders on December 15, 1995, nearly 300,000 people tried it out. They were dazzled
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. AltaVista’s actual search quality techniques—what determined the ranking of results—were based on traditional information retrieval (IR) algorithms. Many of those algorithms arose from
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later, “Gerry Salton was information retrieval.” The World Wide Web was about to change that, but the academics didn’t know it—and neither did AltaVista. While its creators had the insight to gather all of the web, they missed the opportunity to take advantage of the link structure. “The innovation
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of the web as I could, store it in one place, and have a really fast response time. That was the novelty,” says Monier. Meanwhile, AltaVista analyzed what was on each individual page—using metrics like how many times each word appeared—to see if a page was a relevant match
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to a given keyword in a query. Even though there was no clear way to make money from search, AltaVista had a number of competitors. By 1996, when I wrote about search for Newsweek, executives from several companies were all boasting the most useful service
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—we’re breaking new ground, but it’s difficult,” complained Graham Spencer, the engineer behind the search engine created by a start-up called Excite. AltaVista’s director of engineering, Barry Rubinson, said that the best approach was to throw massive amounts of silicon toward the problem and then hope for
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the eye of the beholder,” he said. The second problem, he continued, is making sense of the infuriatingly brief and cryptic queries typed into the AltaVista search field. He implied that the task was akin to voodoo. “It’s all wizardry and witchcraft,” he told me. “Anyone who tells you it
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institutions for the “university” query seemed totally random. The number one result for that generic term in AltaVista would give you the Oregon Center for Optics. Page recalls a conversation back then with an AltaVista engineer who told him that with the way pages were scored, a query for “university” was likely
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department at Cornell University. Kleinberg decided to look at web search. The commercial operations didn’t seem effective enough and were further hobbled by spam. AltaVista’s results in particular were becoming less useful because websites had gamed it by “word stuffing”—inserting multiple repetitions of desirable keywords, often in invisible
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, he didn’t attempt to index the entire web for his link analysis. Instead he did a kind of prewash. He typed a query into AltaVista, took the first two hundred results, and then used that subset for his own search. Interestingly, the best results for the query were often not
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included in those AltaVista solutions. For instance, if you typed in “newspaper,” Alta-Vista would not give you links for The New York Times or The Washington Post. “That
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’s not surprising, because AltaVista is about matching strings, and unless The New York Times happened to say, ‘I’m a newspaper!’ AltaVista is not going to find it,” Kleinberg explains. But, he suspected, he’d have more luck
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there were thousands of sites that in some way dealt with the athletic contests, the politics, the bomb that a domestic terrorist had planted. The AltaVista results for that keyword were riddled with spam and were generally useless. But Kleinberg’s top result was the official Olympics site. Kleinberg began showing
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Plains, New Jersey, a division of Dow Jones. Part of his job was improving information retrieval processes. He tried the search engines at the time—AltaVista, Excite, Lycos—and found them ineffectual and spam-ridden. One day in April 1996 he was at an academic conference. Bored by the presentation, he
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founders Jerry Yang and David Filo, former Stanford students, Yahoo didn’t see the need to buy search engine technology. They also met with an AltaVista designer, who seemed interested in BackRub. But the wise men back in DEC headquarters in Maynard, Massachusetts, nixed the idea. Not Invented Here. Maybe the
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want to be Tesla’d. Google had quickly become a darling of everyone who used it to search the net. But at first so had AltaVista, and that search engine had failed to improve. How was Google, led by two talented but inexperienced youngsters, going to tackle the devilishly difficult problems
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a professor at the University of California at Santa Barbara named Urs Hölzle. He’d played with the earlier crop of search engines such as AltaVista and Inktomi and concluded that, as a computer scientist familiar with Boolean syntax and other techniques, he could use those techniques to find what he
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Internet, as well as scientists writing pioneering papers on network theory. But DEC never used its engineers’ ideas to help AltaVista become Google. (“From the moment I left DEC, I never used AltaVista,” says Louis Monier, who split in 1998. “It was just pathetic. It was completely obvious that Google was better
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much interested in information retrieval. Now that he suspected a revolution was afoot, he was. But his attempts to join up with the AltaVista crew ended ignominiously. “The AltaVista team had grown really fast,” he says, “and hired a bunch of people who I think were not as technically good as they
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“expert sites” and used those to point to the most relevant results. It was something like Jon Kleinberg’s hub approach, but instead of using AltaVista as a prewash to get top search results and then figure out who the expert sites were, Bharat went straight to a representation of the
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them away,” says Bill Gates. “And the remains of those people will be long forgotten.” One of PageRank’s glories (and its original advantage over AltaVista) was its resistance to spam. (The term in this sense meant not unwanted email but links in its results page that secured undeservedly high rankings
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question.” Google made him an offer. He didn’t have much confidence in the company’s future—“I thought they would probably get crushed by AltaVista or something,” he says—but he viewed it as a learning experience. Even if the company didn’t last long, he’d learn about start
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Happens Online,” Wired, November 2007; James Fallows, “The Connection Has Been Reset,” The Atlantic, March 2008; Danny Sullivan, “China’s Great Wall Against Google and AltaVista,” Search Engine Report, September 16, 2002. 273 “Pretty much every possible” Brin discussed Google’s political problems with me in 2002. 273 “Evil is what
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, 52, 380 secrecy of, 56 social networking vs., 371, 374, 382 unbiased results from, 16 Allen, George, 251 Allison, Dennis, 31 Alpha processing chip, 19 AltaVista, 19–20, 24, 25, 27, 36, 37, 38, 53, 168 Amazon.com, 15, 34, 79, 242, 355–56, 363 anchor text, 22 Android, 214–18
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connectivity analysis, 39 WebGuerrilla, 56 web links, 10, 15–16, 17, 18–24, 25–26, 27, 34, 37–38, 51, 53, 59, 217 web searches: AltaVista, 19–20 comprehensiveness in, 52–53, 58 crawling, 19, 23, 34, 41, 42, 52 formatting of, 19 indexing in, 20, 21–22, 26, 41–43
The Invisible Web: Uncovering Information Sources Search Engines Can't See
by Gary Price, Chris Sherman and Danny Sullivan · 2 Jan 2003 · 481pp · 121,669 words
find the information I’m looking for?” The problem is that vast expanses of the Web are completely invisible to general-purpose search engines like AltaVista, HotBot, and Google. Even worse, this “Invisible Web” is in all likelihood growing significantly faster than the visible Web that you’re familiar with. It
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FTP Search, Tim Berners-Lee creates the Web Gopher: WAIS Distributed Search ALIWEB (Archie Linking), WWWWander, JumpStation, WWWWorm EINet Galaxy, WebCrawler, Lycos, Yahoo! Infoseek, SavvySearch, AltaVista, MetCrawler, Excite HotBot, LookSmart NorthernLight Google, InvisibleWeb.com FAST Hundreds of search tools 16 The Invisible Web In 1995 Infoseek
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, AltaVista, and Excite made their debuts, each offering different capabilities for the searcher. Metasearch engines—programs that searched several search engines simultaneously—also made an appearance
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power fall-through results for other popular Web directories. For example, MSN and About.com use fall-through results provided by Inktomi, while LookSmart uses AltaVista results. When a directory search fails to return any results, fall-through results from a search engine partner are often presented as primary results. 24
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’s database. In essence, you’re relying on a computer to essentially do simple patternmatching between your search terms and the words in the index. AltaVista, HotBot, and Google are examples of search engines. How Search Engines Work Search engines are complex programs. In a nutshell, they consist of several distinct
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pages. Because much of the Web is highly connected via hypertext links, crawling can be surprisingly efficient. A May 2000 study published by researchers at AltaVista, Compaq, and IBM drew several interesting conclusions that demonstrate that crawling can, in theory, discover most pages on the visible Web (Broder et al., 2000
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phone number. Yet this is exactly what many of those same people do when they use a general-purpose search engine or directory such as AltaVista or Yahoo! when there are far more appropriate search tools available for a specialized task. The problem is partly that many people think search engines
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by all federal circuit courts—even worldwide sites with legal information. Because LawCrawler is powered by the AltaVista search engine software, the searcher can also employ any of the advanced search capabilities provided by AltaVista, but the search is usefully restricted to the specific legal information domains indexed by LawCrawler. LawCrawler is
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operations on text. But they don’t do very well with non-textual data, at least in the current generation of tools. Some engines, like AltaVista and HotBot, can do limited searching for certain kinds of non-text files, including images, audio, or video 58 The Invisible Web files. But the
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of a Web page Very little bibliographic control, no language control Quality of info extremely varied Cost is low or free Examples: Your vacation pictures AltaVista, Google, Northern Light Many Invisible Web sites Via the Web Various databases, various providers, material not directly searchable via Web search tools Typically highly structured
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search engine. But the authors of disconnected pages are clearly unaware of the requirements for having their pages indexed. A May 2000 study by IBM, AltaVista, and Compaq discovered that the total number of disconnected URLs makes up about 20 percent of the potentially indexable Web, so this isn’t an
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Index engine, which retrieves and indices PDF, postscript, and even compressed files in real time, creating a searchable database that’s specific to your query. AltaVista’s Search Engine product for creating local site search services is capable of indexing more than 250 file formats, but the flagship public search engine
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case for the value of the resources available on the Invisible Web, we’re not suggesting that you abandon the general-purpose search engines like AltaVista, HotBot, and Google. Far from it! Rather, we’re advocating that you gain an understanding of what’s available on the Invisible Web to make
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’t understand. Translation tools accept a URL, fetch the underlying page, translate it into the desired language and deliver it as a dynamic document. AltaVista (http://world.altavista.com/) provides such a service. Please note the many limitations and frequent translation issues that often arise. These tools, while far from perfect, will
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information sources to balance favorable bias. If you’re unfamiliar with a company, try searching for information about it using Hoover’s. For many companies, AltaVista provides a link to a page with additional “facts about” the company, including a capsule overview, news, details of Web domains owned, and financial information
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day will be a safe number to use as his cost basis for calculating the tax on his capital gains. Steve tries Yahoo!, Excite, and AltaVista, searching for historical stock price quotations for Berkshire Hathaway. The search proves futile. Among his results are links for information on historical Berkshire 115 116
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a copy of an out of print book, but with the same time problem as her local bookstore. A quick search with Yahoo!, HotBot, and AltaVista turned up lots of mentions of the book in reviews and on personal Web sites, but no clues as to where she might be able
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a growing compilation of links to the search interfaces of resources that contain data not easily or entirely searchable/accessible from general search tools like AltaVista, Google, and HotBot. The goal of direct search is to get as close as possible to the search form offered by a Web resource (rather
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the search engine to identify and present words or phrases within a certain distance of one another. An example is NEAR. In the case of AltaVista Advanced Search, limiting a search with the NEAR operator requires search terms to be found within ten words (in either direction) of one another. query
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, 97 Alibris, 98, 121 All Earners Beginning Expected Salary (U.S.), 186 All Game Guide, 218 All Music Guide, 221 Allwhois.com, 203 AlphaSearch, 137 AltaVista company links, 106 crawling efficiency study, 29, 72 debut, 16 indexing of file formats, 74 LawCrawler, 41 LookSmart and, 23 nontextile searching, 57–58 translation
Digital Wars: Apple, Google, Microsoft and the Battle for the Internet
by Charles Arthur · 3 Mar 2012 · 390pp · 114,538 words
to hire the company’s first employee, Craig Silverstein. Like Apple, Google was a minnow compared to the leader in its field – the search engine AltaVista, which had earned $50 million in sponsorship revenue in 1997 and was receiving 80 million hits per day. Even so, at the end of the
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. Or so it seemed. The race at first looked as though it would go to the swift and the large. Compaq took a lead with AltaVista, a search engine set up essentially to show off the power of the 64-bit Alpha chip it had acquired along with Digital Equipment Corporation
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. The chips could chomp through huge indexes; all AltaVista needed then was to crawl the web and index it, and it would dominate; and it could make money by selling advertisements on its opening
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using ‘invisible’ text – white on a white background, or sized so small humans could not see it, but AltaVista’s crawler could. The problems with spam became increasingly annoying for users. But AltaVista’s revenues kept rising as more people came online. It wasn’t because it had significantly improved the user
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the user experience worse, because they made the page load more slowly on the dial-up connections used by the vast majority of people. But AltaVista was the best there was, for the moment. In October 1997 Microsoft, which already ran one of the biggest sites on the net, made a
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future, but at launch, it will remain more of the same.’2 Though there were plenty of search engines around in the late 1990s – Yahoo, AltaVista, Lycos, Excite, HotBot, Ask Jeeves, WebCrawler, Dogpile, AOL, Infoseek, Netscape, MetaCrawler, AlltheWeb – none dealt with the key problem of search. Their indexes all treated the
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to provide advertisements. All they knew was that they didn’t want to do banner advertisements. As the dot-com bust deepened in April 2000 AltaVista, then still the biggest search engine on the web, cancelled a planned $300 million initial public offering that it had filed for the previous December
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text advertisement appear when people used ‘lobster’ in a search. It was instantly popular with advertisers. But there were plenty of doubters. In September 2000, AltaVista was the 20th most visited portal, and Google the 48th, according to Media Metrix. ‘There isn’t really good evidence, frankly, that companies focused purely
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it quickly. More and more, they exited via an advertisement. According to Jupiter Media Metrix data, in January 2001 AltaVista had more than 10 million visitors, and Google just under 9 million. AltaVista’s revenue however was collapsing, from $63 million in the quarter ending April 2000 to around $28 million in
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the three months to July 2001 (and at a thumping loss). A quarter of AltaVista’s staff had been laid off in September 2000. As revenue plummeted, so did the visitors essential to attract advertising revenue, to below 8 million
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dropped it, Wall Street would mark its shares down, and the other could pick it up for pennies. Cleverly, Meisel snapped up the now-faded AltaVista and AlltheWeb, from Norway’s FAST (which Google’s engineers considered a potential search competitor), immediately giving Overture its own search presence. And he began
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or don’t use; there isn’t the public visibility of wearing white iPod earbuds while pulling a phone from your pocket. Search is utilitarian. AltaVista didn’t succumb to Google because Google’s site looked better (although a designer could argue that it does), but because the upstart did search
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Private e-mail. 8 Edwards, I’m Feeling Lucky. 9 http://stopdesign.com/archive/2009/03/20/goodbye-google.html 10 http://news.cnet.com/AltaVista-In-search-of-a-turning-point/2100-1023_3-270869.html 11 John Battelle (2005) The Search: How Google and its rivals rewrote the rules
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/ 2 http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/19/business/global/19iht-windows.html 3 http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2064256/Chinas-Great-Wall-Against-Google-And-AltaVista 4 http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704266504575141064259998090.html 5 http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/27/technology/companies/27apple.html?_r=0 6 http://appadvice
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or tables Adobe (i) Flash (i), (ii), (iii), (iv) Ahonen, Tomi (i) Allard, J (i), (ii) see also Microsoft Allen, Paul (i) AlltheWeb (i), (ii) AltaVista (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi), (vii) Amazon (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi), (vii) Analysys International (i) Anderson, Fred (i) AOL (i), (ii), (iii
Nine Algorithms That Changed the Future: The Ingenious Ideas That Drive Today's Computers
by John MacCormick and Chris Bishop · 27 Dec 2011 · 250pp · 73,574 words
ranking algorithms. But as already mentioned, we'll be discussing ranking algorithms in the next chapter. For now, let's focus on the matching phase.? ALTAVISTA: THE FIRST WEB-SCALE MATCHING ALGORITHM Where does our story of search engine matching algorithms begin? An obvious—but wrong—answer would be to start
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for several years. Among the earliest commercial offerings were Infoseek and Lycos (both launched in 1994), and AltaVista, which launched its search engine in 1995. For a few years in the mid-1990s, AltaVista was the king of the search engines. I was a graduate student in computer science during this period
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, and I have clear memories of being wowed by the comprehensiveness of AltaVista's results. For the first time, a search engine had fully indexed all of the text on every page of the web—and, even better
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words that are near to each other. On some search engines, you can do this with the NEAR keyword in the query. In fact, the AltaVista search engine offered this facility from its early days and still does at the time of writing. As a specific example, suppose that on some
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to have been invented by search engine designers: the metaword trick. The cunning use of this trick and various related ideas helped to catapult the AltaVista search engine to the top of the search industry in the late 1990s. THE METAWORD TRICK So far, we've been using extremely simple examples
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word-location trick and the metaword trick certainly convey the flavor of how real search engines construct and use indexes. The metaword trick did help AltaVista succeed—where others had failed—in finding efficient matches to the entire web. We know this because the metaword trick is described in a 1999
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U.S. patent filing by AltaVista, entitled “Constrained Searching of an Index.” However, AltaVista's superbly crafted matching algorithm was not enough to keep it afloat in the turbulent early days of the search industry. As
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the matching pages. And as we will see in the next chapter, the emergence of a new type of ranking algorithm was enough to eclipse AltaVista, vaulting Google into the forefront of the world of web search. 3 PageRank: The Technology That Launched Google The Star Trek computer doesn't seem
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been launched four years earlier, in 1994. How could the garage-bound Google overcome this phenomenal four-year deficit, leapfrogging the already-popular Lycos and AltaVista in terms of search quality? There is no simple answer to this question. But one of the most important factors, especially in those early days
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heart of PageRank—that authoritative pages can confer authority on other pages via hyperlinks—remains valid. It was this idea that helped Google to dethrone AltaVista, transforming Google from small startup to king of search in a few heady years. Without the core idea of PageRank, most web search queries would
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: The Spirit of Computing, by Harel and Feldman; and Introduction to Algorithms, by Cormen, Leiserson, Rivest, and Stein. Search engine indexing (chapter 2). The original AltaVista patent covering the metaword trick is U.S. patent 6105019, “Constrained Searching of an Index,” by Mike Burrows (2000). For readers with a computer science
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-correcting code; Dijkstra's shortest-path algorithm; Euclid's algorithm; factorization; JPEG; key exchange; LZ77; matching; nine algorithms; PageRank; public key; ranking; RSA; web search AltaVista AlwaysYes.exe Amazon Analytical Engine AntiCrashOnSelf.exe AntiYesOnSelf.exe Apple artifact. See compression artificial intelligence. See also pattern recognition artificial neural network. See neural network
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cycle); incoming hyperlink trick IBM ICT idempotent incoming link. See hyperlink inconsistency; after a crash; of replicas. See also consistency index. See also indexing indexing; AltaVista patent on; history of; using metawords; with word locations information retrieval information theory Infoseek inhibitory insurance integer factorization. See factorization internet; addresses; communication via; companies
I'm Feeling Lucky: The Confessions of Google Employee Number 59
by Douglas Edwards · 11 Jul 2011 · 496pp · 154,363 words
to their site and entered the name of a girl I'd known in high school but hadn't heard from in twenty years. Even AltaVista, which I viewed as the best search engine available, had never found a trace of her, so my expectations were low when I hit the
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there she was. Google listed her current contact information as the first result. I tried more searches. They all worked better than they had on AltaVista. I no longer begrudged Google the stationery and the stamp. Other signs pointed to something out of the ordinary. Sequoia Capital and Kleiner Perkins were
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. What did search engines do? They searched. I assumed that we wanted to be the best damn search engine on the planet. Even better than AltaVista. It seemed unlikely we'd ever be a giant like Yahoo, given their head start, but maybe someday we'd be big enough to make
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. Buried in the middle of all the text links was a search box powered by our nemesis Inktomi. Inktomi hadn't always owned that space. AltaVista had provided search to Yahoo until 1998, but they made the fatal mistake of building their own portal site and stealing users from their customer
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's relevancy lured in early adopters and the media, but behind its beguiling look lay an arthritic infrastructure in danger of collapsing. "The ranking beat AltaVista by a mile," Urs told me, "but it was slow and we couldn't build an index reliably." The challenge of improving Google's crawling
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the get-go and never looked back. "We weren't in the lead," Urs said about the early days. "Google was this tiny company and AltaVista and Inktomi were huge in comparison. Inktomi had a cage in the same data center, twenty times bigger than Google's. Much nicer. They had
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start generating revenue to survive. We were selling search services to other companies, which put us in competition with well-established players like Inktomi and AltaVista, and the upside potential didn't look fantastic. While Google was gaining a reputation as a search destination, we had no real standing as a
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didn't already display that page as our first result, RealNames would pay us to include the link above and separate from our results. MSN, AltaVista, and Go.com were doing it, but we struggled with how to display RealNames links while making it clear they were neither Google-generated results
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technology standpoint, but we take the larger view." A technology standpoint offered an insufficiently large view? Should we also be working a Mickey Mouse angle? AltaVista would face a serious channel-conflict challenge, Upside predicted, because it was peddling its technology to other portals while maintaining a consumer site of its
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is staking out an important niche [that] has great potential as a tool for customer service." Google, it suggested, might be an acquisition target for AltaVista. As I finished reading, I realized that I had allowed myself to inhale the air of inevitability settling around our office like a tule fog
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fresh. Maybe they were trying to do too many things. By 2001 we felt we were clearly better than Inktomi results-wise, clearly better than AltaVista, clearly better than FAST. We had the best search engine." And what about Google's comparative quality the year before, when Netscape had become a
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center." Not to mention that Omid Kordestani happened to be an excellent salesperson. "Omid could type in 'IBM' on Google and type in 'IBM' on AltaVista," Urs recalls, "and say 'Hey look, aren't our results better?' That was the level of sophistication. Our search was good, but our coverage was
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bad. You had all kinds of queries where we didn't have the page and AltaVista or Inktomi had it. People's expectations were just low." That wasn't the case with Yahoo, where Udi Manber, a search specialist, was chief
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was home to a continuously updated archive of five hundred million of these posts going back to 1995, including such classics as the announcement of AltaVista's launch and the first mention of Google. Unfortunately, Deja News could no longer afford to maintain the service. In fact, it couldn't even
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mislead search engine users to believe that search results are based on relevancy alone, not marketing ploys."* The complaint called out eight search companies, including AltaVista, AOL, iWon, and Microsoft. Google was not listed among the offenders, but news articles grouped us with companies that had no scruples about crossing the
Understanding Sponsored Search: Core Elements of Keyword Advertising
by Jim Jansen · 25 Jul 2011 · 298pp · 43,745 words
(e.g., CNN, Yahoo!, Microsoft) to serve advertisements on their Web sites (i.e., monetizing their existing traffic). Overture also purchased existing Web search engines, AltaVista and AlltheWeb.com. Potpourri: Yahoo! acquired Overture in 2003 and was later subsumed with Microsoft’s Bing sponsored-search platform in 2010, effectively taking Overture
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a separate listing? One of the major reasons was a complaint to the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) filed by Commercial Alert in July 2001 against AltaVista, AOL Time Warner, Direct Hit Technologies, iWon, LookSmart, Microsoft, and Lycos [27]. The complaint alleged that the confusion caused in consumers who saw mixed paid
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behavior, and �information-searching behavior. Potpourri: Interestingly, the first academic studies of Web information searching using query logs from search engines (Excite, Infoseek, and AltaVista) all came out within a few months of each other (late 1998 and early 1999) and in the same outlet (SIGIR Forum). The three journal
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] stated that there was a significant use of search engines as a navigation appliance. The researchers report that the top fifteen queries from a 2002 AltaVista search log (e.g., google, yahoo, ebay, yahoo.com, hotmail, hotmail.com, thumbzilla, www.yahoo.com, babelfish, mapquest, nfl.com, nfl, weather, www.hotmail.com
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. J. 2004. Web Search: Public Searching of the Web. New York: Kluwer. [45] Jansen, B. J., Spink, A., and Pedersen, J. 2005. “Trend Analysis of AltaVista Web Searching.” Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, vol. 56(6), pp. 559–570. [46] Belkin, N. J. 1993. “Interaction with
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, C. 2010. “21 Secret Truths of High-Resolution PPC.” Click Equations, Philadelphia. [54] Jansen, B. J., Spink, A., and Pedersen, J. 2005. “Trend Analysis of AltaVista Web Searching.” Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, vol. 56(6), pp. 559–570. [55] Iyengar, S. 2010. The Art of
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, 120 AdWords, 14–15, 18, 180–181, 185 aesthetic sensations, 125 affiliation, 124 affordances, 2, 37, 130 aggress, 124 AIDA model, 94 allocation mechanism, 178 AltaVista, 13, 21, 38, 44 American Marketing Association, 139, 152 analysis of variances, 165 Anomalous States of Knowledge, 43 AOL Time Warner, 21 Asimov, Isaac, ix
Explorer's Guide Mexico City, Puebla & Cuernavaca: A Great Destination
by Zain Deane · 8 Sep 2011 · 490pp · 114,589 words
frequent art expositions. Open Tuesday to Sunday 10–5. Free. MUSEO CASA ESTUDIO DIEGO RIVERA Y FRIDA KAHLO 55-5550-1518/1189 Diego Rivera and Altavista, Col. San Ángel Inn, Mexico, D.F. Metro: Barranca del Muerto It’s a bit out of the way (the best way to get here
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is to hop on a pesero from the metro station heading south on Revolución, get off at the intersection of Altavista, and take another pesero to the museum), but worth it for fans of Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo. The two unusual modern buildings built by
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the Roma branch, you can actually get into this one. Open Wednesday to Saturday 9 PM–3 AM. $–$$, depending on band. SHOPPING ALTAVISTA 147 www.altavista147.com.mx Altavista 147, Colonia San Ángel Inn, Mexico, D.F. Metro: Barranca del Muerto As it’s located right next to the Museo Estudio Diego
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. The colorful embroidered shirts in particular are worth the reasonable prices. Open Tuesday–Sunday 11–7. $–$$. MERCADO DE FLORES Avenida Revolución between La Paz and Altavista, Col. San Ángel, Mexico, D.F. Metro: M.A. de Quevedo I haven’t tested the theory, but I hear that there is at least
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, 65, 203, 205, 264 airport transportation, 40–41 Alameda Central, 71, 80, 80, 95 Alamo car rental, 40 Alas del Hombre, 199 Alaska Airlines, 37 Altavista 147, 165 altitude, 43–44 ambulance, 205 American Airlines, 37 American Embassy, 34 Anecuilco, 308, 310 Angamu Turismo Alternativo, 282 Angel Ortiz 0.925, 192
Joel on Software
by Joel Spolsky · 1 Aug 2004 · 370pp · 105,085 words
"searching" also finds documents containing the word "searched" or "sought." So when the big Internet search engines like Altavista first came out, they bragged about how they found zillions of results. An Altavista search for Joel on Software yields 1,033,555 pages. This is, of course, useless. The known Internet contains
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maybe a billion pages. By reducing the search from one billion to one million pages, Altavista has done absolutely nothing for me. The real problem in searching is how to sort the results. In defense of the computer scientists, this is
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want is probably in the top ten. Indeed, search for Joel on Software on Google and you'll see that it comes up first. On Altavista, it's not even on the first five pages, after which I gave up looking for it. __________ 1. See www.google.com/technology/index.html
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be bothering anyone. Or how about: Microsoft .NET makes it possible to find services and people with which to interact. Oh, joy! Five years after Altavista went live, and two years after Larry Page and Sergei Brin actually invented a radically better search engine (Google), Microsoft is pretending like there's
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for years and years. Index A abstractions, leaky–2nd accented characters–2nd Acela express train ActiveNames idea add-in markets, commoditizing advertising–2nd Akerlund, Linus Altavista Amazon.com vs. Ben & Jerry's–2nd customer service at anonymity in crash reports antialiased text, 2nd–2nd AOL vs. Juno, 2nd–2nd lock-in
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–2007) and then headed Enterprise Business Transformation (through April 2011). Before coming to IBM, Ms. Horan was vice president of the Software Group and the AltaVista business unit at Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC; 1994–1998). She was also vice president of Development and Engineering at the Open Software Foundation (1989–1994
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had three different jobs and seven different bosses. I was a vice president in charge of the Software Group Strategy and then development for the AltaVista business unit. Those were the very early days of the internet. Digital had an e-mail product, a firewall product, and several other products related
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to the internet, including the search engine, all in the AltaVista business unit. The search engine became most closely linked to the AltaVista name. It was a very tumultuous period in Digital's history, which culminated in the sale of the company to
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truly working on the bits and bytes of computers. Then I moved into operating systems and device drivers, which still were close to the hardware. AltaVista and Lotus Notes were more collaborative tools—information resources that allowed for searching and sharing across departments and, ultimately, companies. I definitely started to see
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to have content, something that gets me up and excited in the morning. When Digital finally decided they were going to do something with the AltaVista business and the internet, then I was able to settle down and find another little niche for myself there. That was another tough period. Ghaffari
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, on the Internet, barriers to entry are low, and thus any young firm with innovative services could displace Google the way Google displaced Yahoo and AltaVista in the early days of the twenty-first century. With Google unable or unwilling to leverage its advantages though some sort of lockdown, such as
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Lewis in September 1999. “Until recently my favorite search engines were Hotbot (www.hotbot.com) and Alta Vista (www .altavista.com),” Lewis wrote. “Hotbot is useful for finding popular Web sites, and AltaVista is good at ferreting out obscure information. Alta Vista in particular returns a bazillion potential hits when it is
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platform for self-promotion. And existing search engines, like Yahoo, were not helping in that effort. Since about 1995 I had been using Yahoo and AltaVista for my Web navigation. I had a brief and passionate involvement with a much better and faster Web search service, Northern Light, until, facing a
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to my query. From the website developer and critic Waldo Jaquith: It’s difficult to properly emphasize how truly terrible search engines were in 1998. AltaVista and HotBot were as good as it got, and that’s saying very little. Results were basically sorted randomly. Choosing a search engine was really
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, 26, 83 Agre, Phil, 234n71 airline’s financial status reported erroneously, via Google, 78–79 Ajaxwrite (Web-based word processor), 29 Alpha. See Wolfram Alpha AltaVista, 19, 57, 233n71 Amazon, 11, 31, 82, 112, 157, 163 America Online (AOL), 47 Anderson, Benedict, 137 Anderson, Chris, 113, 196 anonymization, of IP addresses
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