Posted on 07/06/2013 11:20:28 AM PDT by Olog-hai
Pioneering search engine AltaVista is due to be shut down on 8 July.
AltaVista was one of the first search engines to index significant amounts of web content, and proved hugely popular before Google debuted. …
AltaVista was launched in 1995 when search engines generally did a poor job of logging information on the web’s rapidly growing population of sites.
The search engine was popular because it had indexed about 20 million webpages, far more than any rival at the time. It developed its own “crawler” technology that did the job of finding web pages and logging what was on them. It also used fast computers behind the scenes to return results quickly. …
(Excerpt) Read more at bbc.co.uk ...
The paranoid test:
“True or false, are the people following you trying to kill you?
Hail and farewell Altavista. Dr Darrel Thurmond was the chief developer and held doctorates in Theology, Linguistics and Computer Science. Graduated from MIT at 18 and suffered from Diabetes. He spoke 5 languages including Swahili and could solve calculus equations in his head but couldn’t win a game of tic-tac-toe.
altavista was pretty good back in the day. IIRC, they also invented the babelfish.
I used to use it. It was the best ... in its day.
I used to be used to using Nymphoseek.
I stopped using Altavista when I discovered it had been bought by Google. I used it for years, but it is no one’s business what I search for online.
I now use Dogpile.com. Now I’ll probably get all kings of messages about how evil Dogpile.com is!
Startpage does not 'piggyback' on Google's crawlers?!?! What in the heck is that supposed to mean? Startpage submits a request to the Google server, in the same manner as you normally would from your browser, and then displays the results. It does so in an anonymous way utilizing proxys. Ixquick is generally the name they utilize outside of the U.S.
Google bots do not have any other SE's "piggybacking" on their proprietary crawls. No one other than Google has access to the bots.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.