Altavista Redesign is more 'Portal-Like' 140
GeHa & others called our attention to the new AltaVista main page that went live late Saturday night (EDT). Apparently the formal kickoff for the redesign is scheduled for Monday and will include a live Lauryn Hill Webcast. I wonder what entertainer Google would choose to help publicize a major site change. Any ideas? UPDATE by RM Sunday morning: the new page is aparently on again, off again until the formal Monday launch. IMO it's not as useful as the old one even though AV is making much noise about it.
Re:what's so great about google? (Score:1)
You can read more about it here [google.com].
Quote:."
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Re:lack of focus (Score:1)
As a side note, I think the utility of the pure search engine is decreasing by the day - regardless of what cruft their front page is filled with, their results are filled with even more. I usually search 2-3 search engines before finding one that seems to give what I'm looking for, and my order of operations is still altavista, yahoo, lycos, google.
Re:Grow up (Score:1)
No more usenet-wide searches, which was the most useful feature of AltaVista, or of any search site, hands down.
DejaNews doesn't cut it for usenet searches because they just don't seem to index everything
Re:HotBot blows. (Score:1)
Search Partners
Research "Slashdot" at AtHand.
Find books on "Slashdot" at bn.com.
Research "Slashdot" at DealerNet.
[sigh]
It's still up, actually. (Score:2)
lack of focus (Score:2)
What is up with all these big players losing their focus? Yahoo wants to have a branded version of everything you can do on the Net. Deja News wasn't happy being a world-class Usenet index, so they've revamped themselves into a sucky consumer portal. Now AltaVista has decided that the thing to do is to is to forget what they used to do well and instead do 12 other things poorly.
On the face of it, this is irrational. The value of the Net was supposed to be precisely that it would allow people to focus on doing one thing well, and then the rest of the world would link to them rather than reinventing the wheel. Why does the world need Yahoo! Auctions, for example, when eBay exists and has a near-perfect implementation of Internet auctioning? Wouldn't the logical thing be for Yahoo to just link to eBay and focus on improving their index?
The thing is -- that would be the logical thing, but we're not living in logical times. All this "portal" BS is a function of the Internet stock bubble. Yahoo IS focused -- on keeping their stock price high, not on the quality of their index. This means that they must jump on every bandwagon that comes along in order to keep all those nervous day traders out there from hitting "SELL" on their Yahoo stock. Same deal for Deja (which is in the process of going public) and AltaVista (owned by CMGI, a public company), as well as Amazon and many others too numerous to mention.
The point is, someday this Net stock bubble is going to burst, and then we'll probably see logic take hold of the Net market and Yahoo! will focus on its directory, Deja on Usenet, AltaVista on searching, etc. -- assuming they survive the downturn -- but as long as crazy investors are willing to throw money at any company that's more focused on being buzzword-compliant than focused on their core business, this weird diversification will persist.
Don't Change this (Score:1)
Re:Adbusters . . LOL (Score:1)
Yahoo... (Score:1)
Portals are idiotic. (Score:2)
So what did they do? The portal was born. All the content of the old services, plus they don't have to provide you with dial-up access to see it! You just come on your own, look at their ads, provide them with demographic information... pretty sweet deal. For them.
The beauty of the Internet is the unconnectedness of these things. Down with portals, and down with AltaVista for joining this insane movement!
Why Portals? (Score:1)
I make heavy use of the "Links" or "Personal Toolbar" buttons instead of using a portal site. Don't most people do this?
Jordan
Make your own portal (Score:2)
Portals are annoying, I can't even comprehend how any of them actually make money except for Yahoo.
"the voices in my head say crazy things"
Ugly ! (Score:1)
text only Altavista (Score:4)
Above is the Link I use, this removes almost everything except the search function.
there are various settings you can set if you hunt for them.
Entertainer? (Score:1)
> to help publicize a major site change. Any
> ideas?
Weird Al?
#include "ihateportalstoo.h"
NOT GOOD (Score:1)
Re:what's so great about google? (Score:2)
Check this [sciam.com] out for more information in what is going on with search engines.
Re:But why bother? (text only Altavista) (Score:1)
When searching for something which is so common you will find hundreds of results and you want the most relevant one - you can't beat google. But for those hard-to-find tidbits altavista is still the best.
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Re:Make your own portal (Score:1)
Okay... I'm intrigued... how do you do this? I know about the RDF file used, but how do you parse it? I suppose writing my own utility to do so would be an interesting project, but I'd rather not do something so involved if I don't have to, as I'm not exactly a master programmer =)
Portals are market driven. (Score:1)
So, I wouldn't blame The Man for this, blame the people too lazy to explore what's out there. There were pioneers on the 'net, blazing new trails, as it were... Now, the homesteaders are coming in, building towns and stripmalls.
Dilletantes (Score:1)
Here's the question: it seems like many of us choose a particular search engine because of a set of features that it implements particularly well-- Yahoo for drill-down searching, AV for boolean queries and more results, etc. However, most portals look just about the same to me, and as a result search sites are looking increasingly homogeneous. Is it really more profitable to try and be all things to all people (and therefore please no one) or is it possible to actually be more successful with a smaller but highly dedicated core audience?
I don't know about you, but I go to search engines to search, not to buy a car, read about the latest fashions, and bid on collectible Elvis plates as well.
Re:But why bother? (text only Altavista) (Score:1)
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Re:It's still up, actually. (Score:1)
Surely having so many of these sites, all containing the same mass of nested links is totally redundant, especially when it is far simpler to use the Bookmark function of a web-browser?
- h2so4
The Only AltaVista Page You'll Ever Need (Score:1)
Although I don't, you might see spamverts in the response. These are trivially deleted with any spamvert blocking proxy.
re: Dilletantes (Score:1)
I wouldn't say that this is neccesarily a Good Thing(TM)
The Only AltaVista Page You'll Ever Need (Score:2)
Although I don't, you might see spamverts in the response. These are trivially deleted with any spamvert blocking proxy.
Re:People want pretty grapics. (Score:1)
The popular portals give users, to a limited extent, convienient access to information. Portals also clutter the user's interface with 'noise'. I believe many users dislike this and would prefer more functional designs.
The question then becomes are there any websites('portals') that provide users with convienient access to diverse information with little 'noise' (lets define this as unwanted, distracting visual elements)? I can't find any.
Slashdot is good since you can configure the interface greatly to both simplify and eliminate various visual elements. You still can't remove the advertisments (that I'm aware of) which are very 'noisy'.
Even shorter (Score:1)
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Yes, who would use altavista? (Score:1)
Even shorter again (Score:1)
Good ol' Lynx.
Re: Dilletantes (Score:1)
I think this is good. Most general-audience portals wind up looking pretty similar anyway, and there's the vast duplication of effort of having different people maintain their collections of links. (Specialized portals aiming at a given target market can always beat the generalized portals, of course.)
A second effect is that this makes dmoz.org's data more important, and may make it worthwhile for companies to help maintain the database. For example, at work we've been considering helping maintain the Science:Engineering:MEMS section on dmoz.org, because we can re-use the data on our site, and this results in better information for the MEMS community, even if they use Excite or, now, Altavista. I hope Excite or Altavista will pay for a few staffers to be ODP editors. -- The Portaloo (Score:1)
Have you seen Alan Cox's Portaloo [linux.org.uk] yet? It provides a reasonably spartan display, and seems to focus on providing information only, rather than glitz.
What's even nicer is that it's open source, [linux.org.uk] and so you can modify it to provide whatever you like.--Joe
:-)
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Re:HotBot blows. (Score:1)
[...]if you look carefully, you'll find a link to the text-only page ().
Try searching from there.
--
I really wish (Score:2)
It's always fascinating to see a little bit of a publisher's design philosophies in the colophon for a book, and I think that goes double for a web site.
--JRZ
Re:But why bother? (text only Altavista) (Score:1)
Anyway, here's how you search for "to be or not to be" on Google:
"+to +be +or not +to +be"
If you + all the words, it ignores all the +'s. Luckily, 'not' isn't a stop-word, so you can un-plus that.
If you need to search for a phrase that's made entirely of stop-words, simply add an 'a' without a +. It'll be ignored and the rest of the search will work.
A bit confusing, but not nearly as confusing as the fact that Altavista will return pages where the words are nowhere near each other even if you put them in quotes.
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Slashdot missing from The Portaloo (Score:1)
Assuming that The Portaloo uses RSS/RDF to get its headlines they should be able to use many more existing channels (including
/.).
most annoying portal (Score:1)
Re:Altavista new look (Score:2)
The New Altavista [geocities.com]
Text far too small (Score:1)
Even on Windoze browsers, the text on it is titchy. It's also not a lot of use either - looks like they might have changed the search algorithm.
Re:Ugly ! (Score:1)
I wonder who they consult for such things? External designers? Was this choice as hard to do as what way PacMan would be facing (left)? And most important of all, is this some kind of marketing stuff? (Santa is red because of Coca-Cola, you know...)
/* Steinar */
unreadable fonts (Score:1)
Altavista power, Google simplicity (Score:1)
Re:Even shorter again (Score:1)
Re:HotBot blows. (Score:1)
--
Re:Is it just me or.. (Score:1)
I actually think this also connects to the recent IM wars over buddy lists and what not. I guess these are the intellectual property issues that are only starting to be addressed.
software patents? (Score:1)
-lx
i tried, it doesn't work all that great. (Score:1)
-lx
Haiku (Score:1)
AltaVista was the best.
Now it just finds spam.
Google search engine
Is much more spam resistant,
And they run Linux
Ask Jeeves is nice too.
Questions are in real English.
But replies are not.
Jeeves is metasearch.
It queries many engines,
to summarize them.
Can anyone say
What the next idea will be?
If you can, get rich.
Re:lack of focus (Score:2)
I've actually grown to like Deja's implementation of the ratings features. It's really pretty well done. Sadly, the puke blue and bile green colour scheme makes me shudder every time I enter the site. And I wish they hadn't changed the normal Courier or Times Roman in the message bodies to helvetica, which is barely readable under any Unix I know of.
These annoying facts have caused my total visits to Deja to drop something like 80%. It's pretty sad, since I think what they're doing with the ratings is actually not half bad.
Incidentally, is doing a very nice job competing with Deja on the ratings category - check 'em out. I really like the "web of trust" and the "payments to reviewers" ideas. We'll see how they do.
D
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Bands for Google? (Score:1)
Quite definitely the shortest (for lynx) (Score:1)
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JPG of new Altavista (Score:1) [128.253.254.56]
SlashMirror: Where to put files for fellow
/.'ers
or html (Score:1)
SlashMirror: Where to put files for fellow
/.'ers
The Musical artist (Score:1)
maybe They Might Be Giants????
Is it just me or.. (Score:1)
Re:unreadable fonts (Score:2)
Sites are increasingly using Helvetica/Arial or something similar, and it renders under Linux as a truly ghastly font that should have never been let out of the foundary.
I don't know why they are - I think it's really ugly, and it's painfully tough to read, too. Even in Windows, I don't think it looks that hot.
It's fairly well known that serif fonts (such as Times Roman or Palatino) are easier to read than sans serif (like Helvetica). But Helvetica looks more "modern", and I guess looking more "modern" is more important than actually being legible.
D
D
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Re:lack of focus (Score:1)
True enough, I suppose. Though it does beggar the question a bit of "What is Yahoo?". Perhaps Yahoo is a bad example, as they are fortunate enough to be the Big Gorilla net company -- they can be as vague as they want regarding their business plan and people will still bookmark them. Of course, there aren't many other companies that can apply this strategy successfully.
Yeah, Deja is in trouble. They were actually a prime factor that prompted my earlier rant -- their new ratings stuff is neat, but their Usenet search features have become highly difficult to use, and return spotty, inconsistent results. They'd be better off changing the name of the company again and ditching Usenet altogether, IMHO, rather than continue with their half-ratings, half-Usenet strategy. But why do one thing well when you can do two things poorly?
:-)
Re:Wanted: Google for Usenet (Score:1)
You could try dejasearch
[hypermart.net]...
It's a perl script which will query dejanews for you and consolidate all of the found messages into one large html file which you can digest later off line.
Australian Altavista. (Score:1)
Hotbot is stop two for me (Score:1)
Re:Chilly Willy (Score:1)
1. it's what the masses want. slashdot is not the masses. AOL is the masses. the web's to complicated for them they way it is, so they want everything tied up into a nice pretty package.
2. profits. if people start using your page as there basic portal to the web, you make more money from advertising.
hey look at it this way, slashdot could even be considered a portal. it's got google, amazon, shopper.com, hey even news sites.
metalgeek
Re:Entertainer? (Score:1)
>The Invisible Man.
>shrunk down to one pixel, of course, so as not
>to interfere with the speed of loading.
Or maybe they could get William Shatner singing "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds"?
Altavista as a Portal (Score:1)
Doesn't bother me. I've used it for so long, my fingers are still trained to type "altavista.digital.com" without errors and faster than I can even think it.
So far the screenshots look like it's almost the same... not like the move from dejanews.com to deja.com... now that sucked.
I don't click on the ads anyway for large corporations (Digital/Compaq, Yahoo, etc)...
-m
Re:unreadable fonts (Score:1)
Re:Altavista new look (Score:2)
Word at the Open Directory Project is that the "new" AltaVista has been popping in and out of existence all day. Presumably, this represents a failed attempt to test the new site without showing it to the public.
(According to CNET [cnet.com], there was a beta version of the new AltaVista at beta.altavista.com [altavista.com], but it was taken down when CNET phoned AV about it. Obviously, whatever AV's doing to hide the new page from the public now isn't working quite right.)
Chilly Willy (Score:3)
I'm so damn tired of every company putting a 'portal' online. I just want a page that I can search for things with. I don't want the same re-hashed AP/Reuters newsfeed that every other website has. I don't want the stupid celebrity-chats, java-games, weather, maps, webmail, shopping venues or discount long-distance phone deals.
Give give me a damn field to enter my keywords in and a button to click.
Everyone wants to corner every part of the market. What happened to 'Do one thing and do it well'? I'm not so lazy that I can't type a new address to go to a seperate webpage. If I'm on a search page that is done well (Google) and I need to catch up on the day's news, I'll take the two seconds to type in another URL.
Marketing hacks and corporate clunkheads seem to think the average web-surfer wants to stay on one webpage forever and have everything they need on that one page. I find that as tacky as going to Castco and seeing the cars and home entertainment systems on sale. If you are buying a car or a stereo-system, go to a car-dealership or a stereo store -- where you can find quality items from people who specialize in them.
I'm not going to buy my car in the next aisle down from the canned-food and I'll not get my news from the same place people search for pr0n.
To be a successful online service, you do not need to spread yourself over everything. You do not need to plaster your site with a thousand banner-ads. You do not even need to register with a search engine. Just do what you do, like what you do, and do it well. People will notice it and appreciate it.
My website, for example, was just something I threw together while I was telecommuting and learning Perl. I figured I would take the site down within a few days once I had learned how to read and dissect the script. And here I am a few months later with a very successful auction site for a very specific group of people. No search engine, no Reuter's news, no banners or advertising, no costs to anyone. And I've never even registered the site on a single search engine. (That's what robots.txt is for anyway, duh!)
My point is not that my site is so special, but that you don't have to become a commercialized sell-out to do well and you do not have to offer every service under the sky. Find something you like and stick with it. Word-of-mouth turned Fight Club from a ho-hum box-office feature to a number-one hit. It can do the same for your site.
Best of all, if you really care about what you are doing, it doesn't cost an arm and a leg. Let CBS and Tide throw a million dollars at a web project that looks and behaves like every other portal in the world -- you can have something unique to offer for a few bucks.
Speaking of which, could you imagine a project manager with any corporation presenting a website project that can be maintained for $20 per month?
The previous reasons are also why you come to Slashdot for your tech news and gossip instead of finding it burried in the back of your local newspaper, written by some washed-up entertainment editor who's greatest technical accomplishment was booting up their iMac.
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icq:2057699
seumas.com
what's so great about google? (Score:1)
-lx
Who still uses Altavista..? (Score:1)
Altavista used to be pretty good, now it's pretty useless. This has happened to every single search engine I've used. They were good when they first came out, but as time passes their quality starts to deteriorate. I'm not sure why this happens, I guess they just aren't maintained properly. The only decent engine now is Google, but I'm really afraid it too will start to suck in a year or two.
Link Farms . . glow your own (Score:3)
For example, this is the link-o-bar across the top of the page from yahoo.
Yahoo! Auctions - bid now! Coca-Cola, Dragon Ball, Halloween, Britney Spears, Pokemon... Shopping - Auctions - Yellow Pages - People Search - Maps - Travel - Classifieds - Personals - Games - Chat - Clubs Mail - Calendar - Messenger - Companion - My Yahoo! - News - Sports - Weather - TV - Stock Quotes - more...
[head spinning] Britney Spears, Pokemon
..I'm gonna hurl. . .
Each one of these demographically focused links is pointing back at the main page to prevent "leakage" (the term used when a user actually gets what they came for, and leaves the site). What's more is even *external links* are 'pass-through' links for (tracking reasons) so the user doesn't really know when they are leaving the site.
Alta-vista started out as a text only robot running on Alpha. It was fast and effective. slowly, little by little, they grew it into a link farm that is distracting and annoying to everyone. Another little trend I recently noticed , while clicking through my.CNN, is using pop-up windows that turn off the navigation and location tool bar. While it's very interesting, it forces the user to stay on-domain (because there's no nav bar) and the user doesn't know where the content is coming from (because the location bar is gone). But anyway, I digress. Back to the issue at hand.
Google is starting out the same way. A superior indexing robot generating links that are fast and effective. This week, Goggle added 2 links on the main page. Mark my words . . over the next 6 months, you'll slowly see more and more (mostly on-domain) links added to Google until it to will become a towering heap of babble.
What we users want is a link farm that actually points to content! That's why
/. is my portal. That's why It's under my HOME button. That's why /. is an indispensable information source.
A link farm that 'gets to the point, and points to the get'
Now.. if only someone could build a general user link farm on the
/. model?
Re:Altavista new look (Score:1)
"We're sorry, but the server is unavailable right now." (or something to that effect)
Tried it twice with the same results. Went to another search engine. Came back later, and AV worked again... but had the same old interface. Who knows what they're thinking? If they're trying to *hide* the new interface, then accidentally taking it live isn't a good solution...
Slarty
Re:Make your own portal (Score:1)
Re:Is it just me or.. (Score:1)
I think you've missed the point...the forces driving these changes DO end up harming the usefulness of the site...just look at dejanews, or the IMDB... Neither of these sites are nearly as useful as they once were. Dejanews is practically useless when used through the official web interface. Just wait, in a few months altavista will be rendered almost useless as well.
Re:HotBot blows. (Score:1)
I did read your post, and I tryed the link you sugested.
Hotbot still blows.
Re:Why Portals? (Score:1)
I'm afraid I have to agree. (Score:1)
AltaVista going the portal root is terrible. Aren't there enough of the things anyway?
Dala (Blatant plug) (Score:1)
Re:But why bother? (text only Altavista) (Score:2)
Re:unreadable fonts (Score).
D
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Text only altavista still availaible (Score:1)
For those who didn't know that wonderful option..
Re:lack of focus (Score:2)
Unfortunately for your theory about loss of focus creating prolblems, dejanews.com started sliding downhill about a year ago (or maybe even more); each change of their user interface made the service harder and harder to use. I still remember my discussions with their very nice tech support chap, who said the idea was to make it easier for newbies. Well, I don't think there was a single grizzled old verteran user who didn't despise the changes
I'm wondering how they do now with the average chap, their targets. Ratings seem to have been a reasonable success, at least judging by the number and variety that have been created. But the USENET archive is, as you said, saddled with a horrid user interface now. It almost makes me tempted to do my own archive, if I could afford the massive capital needed to do it
D
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This isn't necessarily a bad idea. (Score:1)
The right portal formula, IMHO?
1. First and foremost, you have to take customisation/personalisation to the max. As someone else said in another message, your crucial objective is to give busy users the information they need quickly, and eliminating the noise that they don't. So have passworded individual accounts on the site, the way they do on this one, and customise, customise, customise! If you can do this correctly, you'll be providing an invaluable service to a lot of people...It doesn't have to have much to do with making a buck.
2. The banner issue:- This isn't about being money grubbing and commercialistic, but as I'm sure Commander Taco could tell you, running a popular web site costs money...and sometimes lots of it, hence his acquisition by Andover. Do the banner thing intelligently...Set up perl scripts which are able to match particular banners to people who'll be interested in them, based on account profiles...but if you do it that way, not only are people likely to not see your banners as intrusive and click on them, but who knows? If you have business users, and you're showing banner ads for business suppliers or courses, you may really be helping the user out by connecting him to that information.
3. The Web-based email issue:- Yes, there are some web based email services which really do blow goats, (Hotmail is the main one which immediately comes to mind) and yes maybe they are inherently not as secure as straight POP3, however I would argue that Joe Average User isn't going to really need absolutely bulletproof security anywayz. You put in all the standard disclaimers about not including credit card numbers in emails...and if you're really worried about it, maybe you could try and rig up pgp support somehow.
4. Spiders VS Directories:- Of course a spider is going to be tons better than a directory. A spider updates itself, whereas with a directory like Yahoo the user has to submit a site manually...and if your portal is popular, you then have to employ a batallion of auditors to go through all of the submissions. Try getting a submission on Yahoo within a week or two, and I'll be surprised if you succeed unless you're someone extremely important. Try getting a site on AltaVista, and if you've got your Meta tags and possibly a ROBOTS.TXT written correctly, it'll be there within 72 hours in many cases.
;) make a few bucks on the side.
My suggestion is that if you're thinking of putting a portal up yourself, don't even think about trying to run your own directory...Take advantage of other people who have good spider technology, but maybe a sucky portal by linking to them with one of the affiliate programs that many of them run. Use your head, and your users will thank you, the people who run the spider will thank you if they like getting exposure, and you might even (horrors!
I think that about covers most of the issues that people here seem to have grizzles with. And as I said, if you don't like the existing portals, put one together yourself! I'm in the process of doing it, and it really isn't all that difficult.
People can say portals suck, and maybe in 90% or so of cases they're right, because the faceless corps who run them *are* only interested in making money. But done correctly, I believe a good portal can be an invaluable service to everyone involved. A portal is like anything else...you do a bad portal, and it'll suck...you do a good portal, and it won't.
Slashdot itself, while not a portal par se, is I believe a good example of what I'm talking about. The customisation (the most important element of a portal, IMHO) is done cluefully, and the article system works well. It's a shame that some of it's readers aren't perhaps just a little more broad minded, but hey, you can't have everything. *grin*
Redesign? What redesign? (Score:1)
I don't see why they call it a redesign when I have to scroll down to see what's happened. Besides, I never do scroll down, since I'm there to search, and nothing else. If that's what it takes to do a redesign most news-sites get redesigned every time the main headline changes.
Altavista, woo. (Score:1)
Gotta keep the money people happy, and portals are the thing right now.. Portals might be useless to your average slashdotter, but way back when, I bet you used something pretty portal-like as a homepage at one point in your early days on the web.. Personally, it was the NIN homepage back when I had to telnet to a freenet to get at Lynx... People outgrow it, but you can make some money off their eyeballs before they do..
Man that Jane's IT quiz banner flashy and annoying..
Personal Portal (Score:1)
I've done something similar : I'm also learning Perl, and I threw together my personal portal [planetinternet.be], containing just links to the headlines I want, the single stock quote I'm interested in, and a funny banner. I can also send stuff in by e-mail, and it gets added to the bottom of the page (like the link about Doom System Administration)
The page might not be up to date when you read this : due to technical reasons, I can't host a site at home, so I added a crontab entry to automatically upload the page every hour. But I'm booted in windows right now, because I wanted to play some games after reading SlashDot. If you're interested in the source, or if someone has suggestions to improve it, mail me
:-)
Re:what's so great about google? (Score:2)
That is not the case.
Here's a quote from [google.com] Google offers an advanced patent-pending technology called PageRankTM to deliver the most relevant results. PageRank ensures that the most important, relevant pages always come up first and that your users will always find what they are looking for. The PageRank algorithm was developed at Stanford University by leading computer scientists for more than three years before the company was formed.
My understanding of the algorithm is that it uses the pointing text in the hyperlink as key words for rating relavance. For example, If you have a site expelling your thoughts (about the spooky resemblance between Britney Spears and Pica-chu and why they're never seen together), if 50 people point to your web site with a "britney" link, and 100 people point with a "pica-chu" link, you're site gets rated as highly relevant pica-chu. As a result of this rating system, the engine is 'self moderating' and very scalable.
The other thing that rocks about google is there isn't any junk to distract the user. And yea...
..and ummm...it hapens to run on the worlds most powerfull operating system ;).
Re:Why Portals? (Score:1)
I think this is something only big portal can afford. As for their "reviews" and "discussion", I never touch them. I still use my old channels to get movie opinions.
CY
I've got this great idea.. (Score:1)
..why don't you go to Google [google.com] and, well, figure it out for yourself? If you can't be bothered with clicking on a link, entering in some text, and clicking a button, I'll give you a couple of highlights (although IANATEOG.. figuring that one out shall be an exercise for the reader -- crack that one, Signal 11
;): 1) uses a search engine that is actually intelligent .. it checks not just for the words you wanted, but filters out any "common" words you entered (those that would index, oh, a couple billion sites or so), and checks to see if the words are close to each other in the document (which means entering in Sun Microsystems is more likely to yield what you'd expect than many other search engines) 2) there are no stupid banner ads (you'd be amazed how excited this makes a lot of people) 3) there just aren't any damn frills, period. You have the logo. You have a short blurb. Then you have a search box and a couple of buttons to choose from (along with a couple of specialized sections). I don't even think it causes a scrollbar to manifest on the front page. Nothing fancy. It just works. And it works well, unlike any other search engine I've ever come across. I could care less if it was running fscking Minix. All I know is that I have a lot better chance of finding what I want than with Yahoo!, which practically the only other "user friendly" engine I can think of (a lot of the others make me want to vomit.. oh wait, Yahoo! does too..).
So, yeah. Google sucks, but it's cool because it runs on Linux. Yeah.. or something.
Re:Entertainer? (Score:1)
The Invisible Man.
shrunk down to one pixel, of course, so as not to interfere with the speed of loading.
wg
the simplest possible version (Score:1)
try [av.com]
for those bad browser days
Of COURSE it's not as useful: it's a porta-potty (Score:1)
Google is a great site because it finds things for you on the web, and does a superb job of it. Portals, by definition, attempt to do everything, and must perforce do them all more or less badly.
Alta Vista - a once-great search site of the early web that faded into insignificance in the wave of millenial suicides that was triggered by the passing fad for all-purpose portal sites. (from The Twenty-second Century Encyclopedia of Technology)
personal "portal" (Score:1)
Check out the start page [netdoor.com] I made for myself. I keep it up-to-date and have gotten some good compliments on it. The tools are the best part of it. I use them often.
Re:Portals are idiotic. (Score:1)
portals aren't much good for an experienced web citizen. I don't like them either. However, I will probably keep AltaVista as my start page because I like the search engine, and search engines are what it's all about!
So even if the new design makes AltaVista look more like Yahoo or Netscape Netcenter etc etc etc, the search engine still rules.
Re:unreadable fonts (Score).
Actually, on the normal display screen, the general rule of thumb, is for using a san-serif font for any text displayed under 12 pixels.
Although serifs work great for print, there is a huge difference in resolution between the computer screen and paper/ink. While on paper the serifs may add visual distinction ease reading, it mostly ends up just being visual noise when displayed on screen.
Lastly, is that generally Unix/X has really crappy font rendering compared to m$/mac systems, and also generally the fonts on X have inferior hinting.
DejaClassic (Score:1)
Re:unreadable fonts (Score:1)
Re:Make your own portal (Score:1)
Re:style sheets? (Score:1)
Very nice (Score:1)
Re:text only Altavista (Score:1)
Thankfully, the new (dis?)improved Alta Vista once again has a link to the 'text only' page, which was missing for a while. (The text-only page was still accessible if you'd bookmarked it, mind you, but the link from the graphical page was missing.)
Now if only they'd get rid of the flarking fonts and style sheets...I can live with the stupidly designed way-too-wide table since what's trailing off the right edge is crap anyway.
Re:Portals are idiotic. (Score:1)
The internet is by its very nature distributed and decentranlized. But Big Business can't grasp that concept. They desperatly want to take a piece of cyberspace, fence it in and charge admission. You don't pay this admission in cash, but by giving up a bit of your freedom, by narrowing your spectrum of possible choices, by submitting demographic data, by being exposed to banner ads.
Nobody would try to build a portal that was truly free of charge and really benefitted the customers cause there would be no way of making money from it. And this game is all about the money.
--Bogey