Glad to see someone else had the same experience. When someone recommended Google to me, I tried it and immediately went back to AltaVista. The only distinctive characteristic I remember noticing was the immense whitespace on the Google home page. That sort of simplicity in page design was different from other search and portal websites at the time.
Using AltaVista for me meant digging through page after page of results. Comprehensiveness was the main concern. It was up to the user to evaluate the relevance of the results.
Early Google made similar claims about comprehensively searching millions of pages, but as we know today, they are intent on inferring meaning and purpose. They actively discourage and prevent users from combing through page after page of results. User evaluation (i.e., intelligence) is not expected. Google attempts to evaluate results for the user based on popularity, originally estimated primarily by counting backlinks. Popularity as a filter is useful sometimes but deeply flawed at others. It's arguable Google has dulled, atrophied or stunted development of web users' analytical skills. When it first appeared on the web, Google had no paid placements and no advertising. What was not to like? They later abandoned their original mission to avoid the influence of paid placement. They became beholden to advertising.
It was not difficult to see when and where the influence of advertising came into AltaVista. However when this started to happen at Google, Google tried to hide the ads by making them text-only. As if the influence was not there.
We need another AltaVista, where user evaluation of results is allowed and encouraged, with a mission statement like the
original Page and Brin paper announcing Google: no influence by advertising. Ultimately PageRank was dependent on human discretion: the decision whether or not to link to another page. We soon learned that this discretion, this choice to link or not to link, easily becomes driven by money when people know it effects PageRank. Google quickly got gamed and it has been trying to pretend it can manage this ever since.
I also had this experience. However, I now feel all search engines are returning worse results. Very rarely can I find anything meaningful outside of major content providers. Everywhere my results are filtered through a local government lens. In many ways it feels like search on Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, WeChat, closed appstores, etc. have become the new defacto content aggregation mechanisms, and those are tending toward feeds and curated content rather than requiring active search. The best and most meaningful results on most actual search engine results pages are Wikipedia excepts, or trivial widgets (currency or unit conversion results, weather forecasts, etc.). I don't have any objective measures and am unlikely to be a representative sample but I feel I am searching less, my browser has become a URL-bar based memory system, the traditional 'home page' notion has been replaced by a Firefox auto-curated most-frequent-sites list, and I use traditional search engines more like a command line than a library index. OTOH we now have Library Genesis which is brilliant.
Irrespective of its legal status, LG is proof one does not need 75,000 employees, nor any perceived "brilliance", to provide a world-class, non-commercial information retrieval service. It can hold its own next to many university libraries' remote access facilities and it puts Google Scholar to shame. It is command-line friendly and offers bulk data. Unlike Google, LG does not try to guess what the user is searching for and answer questions. One encourages traditional learning, the other is incessantly trying surveil its users in the name of selling online ad services to third parties.
Using AltaVista for me meant digging through page after page of results. Comprehensiveness was the main concern. It was up to the user to evaluate the relevance of the results.
Early Google made similar claims about comprehensively searching millions of pages, but as we know today, they are intent on inferring meaning and purpose. They actively discourage and prevent users from combing through page after page of results. User evaluation (i.e., intelligence) is not expected. Google attempts to evaluate results for the user based on popularity, originally estimated primarily by counting backlinks. Popularity as a filter is useful sometimes but deeply flawed at others. It's arguable Google has dulled, atrophied or stunted development of web users' analytical skills. When it first appeared on the web, Google had no paid placements and no advertising. What was not to like? They later abandoned their original mission to avoid the influence of paid placement. They became beholden to advertising.
It was not difficult to see when and where the influence of advertising came into AltaVista. However when this started to happen at Google, Google tried to hide the ads by making them text-only. As if the influence was not there.
We need another AltaVista, where user evaluation of results is allowed and encouraged, with a mission statement like the original Page and Brin paper announcing Google: no influence by advertising. Ultimately PageRank was dependent on human discretion: the decision whether or not to link to another page. We soon learned that this discretion, this choice to link or not to link, easily becomes driven by money when people know it effects PageRank. Google quickly got gamed and it has been trying to pretend it can manage this ever since.
We need non-commercial search.