Brett_Tabke - 10:13 pm on Oct 6, 2000 (gmt 0)

Hi jliving, welcome to the board.

AltaVista, 95% satisified. I really like what Alta has done in the last year. A few minor points-of-contention with AV:
- The need for speed. Av has ben slow and slower this summer and fall. Ya, it will make me use soemthing else when I'm in a hurry.
- Don't want or need the "translate", "more pages" or "related pages" links. Nobody uses that stuff - it is not worth the extra bytes to download it. No I don't want to configure it. I want it gone by default.
- Page size and last download date. I'd like them back.
- Cut down the search page size. It is kicking at 30k. That is too much for 10 simple listings.
- Darking the search results. The descrptions are so visually overpowered by the titles and the "translate" links, that they are hard too read. They are almost the most important part of the page and it is displayed in a very light color (too light). I think this fact alone drives me away from av some times. Almost every time at AV I end up clicking the "kill css" button within Opera.
- Autorefresh? Why, it's annoying to be surfing in a new window, and see alta refresh it's self in the back. Although, I use it as a disconnection stopper for the entire day.

Raging: a nice idea. Sometimes the results line up with AV, sometimes they don't. Why? I always wonder just what the results really are.
The speed is better. Still has the 'more like this', 'related' junk on the page. Who told the se's we wanted this stuff? I sure don't.
I wish they would also nuke the "hr" tags between the results - makes the page hard to read with no white space.

Fast AllTheWeb85% satisified. It really is FAST. Touch spammy at times, but it is so quick to use. I often find myself there when I know I'm to have to dig though alot of results to find what I want. (I wish AV were this fast).

Lycos, way too much extra info on the search page (self spam). The ratio of content to advertising is much too much. I think Lycos is in a contest with Internet.com to see who can put the most self advertisments on a page.

Hotbot, if I wanted to know who can write the best description line, I'd hold a contest. They turned one of the best se's on the net into one of the worst. I don't care for dayglow.

Infoseek. I still like em. Fast, clean looking results and mostly relavant. No depth though - searches tap out at the top ten. Search Within These Results is killer.

Excite: I like what they have done this year by cleaning up the search results of all the extra nonsense. The problem with Excite is coverage - results just aren't deep enough or fresh.

Google. The results pages read like randsom notes. I rarely find what I am after at Google, I rarely use it anymore. The excerpted style results is of no use. I'd rather read a full title and full description.