Altavista: The rise and fall of the biggest pre-Google search engine
I like reading this comment thread on why google may have been superior to altavista. It gives a more “adult” perspective on something I remember as a kid.<p>I was in middle or high school, and remember using several different search engines: altavista, lycos, yahoo, dogpile, etc.  they all were bulky portals and search results probably weren’t great (that’s why I used so many).<p>Then one day a friend said “hey have you used google?” I said no, and he showed me.<p>-it was clean/simple<p>-the search page (and results) loaded really fast<p>-the search results must’ve been better as well<p>-I remember I liked the quirkiness of it too. It felt fun to use Google<p>From that day on I only remember using Google, until recently given their size, been using Duck Duck Go more often. It’s pretty good for regular search (though maybe 10% queries return some less relevant results than Google) but product search still has a long way to go.