Forum Moderators: open

Message Too Old, No Replies

Altavista plan a big makeover next week!

A big comeback?

         

Allergic

8:11 pm on Nov 8, 2002 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member



Altavista gonna make a big makeover next week. New algo, logo, look, functionalities, idex refresh rate and relevancy. A private presentation have been made in London this week to Olivier Andrieu from Abondance.

Macguru

8:20 pm on Nov 8, 2002 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member



Another great find by Allergic! Merci!

I am curious to see that next week. What they really need, is a big marketing effort, now that they got rid of overly agressive advertising.

CuriousWeb

8:36 pm on Nov 8, 2002 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member



Funny I got hit by scooter quite heavily for the first time on a newish site and wondered if anything was going on...

Brad

8:46 pm on Nov 8, 2002 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member



Thanks for the tip Allergic. This will give us something exciting to look forward too next week. :)

bobmark

9:54 pm on Nov 8, 2002 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member



LOL since I never get traffic from AV despite regular deep crawls by Scooter, I won't get too excited in anticipation.

tedster

10:08 pm on Nov 8, 2002 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member



Alta certainly used to be a contender. I'm glad they're not just rolling over and playing dead.

I've got a few too many egss in just one basket right now so I'll be cheering if they can put together a viable engine again.

JonB

10:10 pm on Nov 8, 2002 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member



great news! i hope they will be back to their powers that was once back in time :) i was getting very good results from them before i even knew about google.

scooter was hitting my pages too these days.

KevinC

10:50 pm on Nov 8, 2002 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member



yup two I have 2 new sites that have seen scooter come by a lot in the last couple days.

vitaplease

12:29 pm on Nov 9, 2002 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member



Ive seen scooter being rather busy since august.

In general my Scooter spider hits are about 1/8th of the Googlebot hits.

Scooter tends to need a lot of visits to catch these hits though.

Also had scooter-3.2.SFO and scooter-3.2.XX0 do some infrequent visiting.

creative craig

12:34 pm on Nov 9, 2002 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member



I also have had a visit from Scooter, looking forward to next week :)

Craig

vitaplease

12:57 pm on Nov 9, 2002 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member



You were right Allergic, seems to be tuesday:

[news.com.com...]

- ad-free home page
- fresher search results

with quite some new features:

- news - also regional
- refine search - based on natural-language questions

Liane

1:22 pm on Nov 9, 2002 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member



Despite first place rankings in "free SERPS" for 18 major keyword combinations, I get literally no traffic to speak of from AV. Of course, the 6 sponsored listings probably don't help much.

I hope they manage to clean up their page design and cut down on the number of sponsored links at the top of the page.

Perhaps the phoenix will once again rise from the ashes, but I don't think I'll hold my breath! I'm afraid this may be a case of much too little ... way too late. We'll see though. It would be nice if one more engine could give Google a run for their money! MSN just isn't cutting it and Fast can't seem to get a foothold in the market in any meaningful way.

I wonder how long Google can stay on the crest of the wave?

tedster

2:17 pm on Nov 9, 2002 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member



I'm looking forward to see what they do with natural language search refinements. AV has been working with linguistics for a loooong time. A truly useful innovation here could catch the public's fancy and bring them back more quickly.

I've felt for a while that the search engine that gets search refinements down in a way that the non-techie can easily use will have a big handle on the future. After all, imagine what search will be like when the web doubles again, and beyond.

How will you find what you want when there are 10 billion pages in the index?

Macguru

2:27 pm on Nov 9, 2002 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member



Both Google and Fast offer a great unobstrusive search service. Now AV is preparing to match this quality.

The rest is all about marketing. Good luck AltaVista!

<fixed typo>

[edited by: Macguru at 2:40 pm (utc) on Nov. 9, 2002]

john316

2:33 pm on Nov 9, 2002 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member



>>The rest is all about marketing.<<

How true.

A tip for AV...if you are listening:

SE promotion is about self promotion.

Don't get into a war with the folks who will be promoting you. Find the "neighborhoods" that are promoters and algo accordingly.

chiyo

2:43 pm on Nov 9, 2002 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member



I'm sure many, including little old me with be wishing AV all the best. Their index seemed to improve 6 months ago, then 2 or 3 years ago started to go bad again. From my reading it looks like it may be a clone of Google though... news portal, lean, "confident" rather than lucky. Let's hope they find some way to differentiate or it will all be in vain.

Macguru

2:48 pm on Nov 9, 2002 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member



"We're focusing on the power of precision--the power to search the infinite Web and the precision to find the right results,"

Now lets hear that loud and clear!

mack

6:09 pm on Nov 9, 2002 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Administrator 10+ Year Member Top Contributors Of The Month



From what I read on the news.com site their index is effectivly three times smaller than google's. How can they claim "the power to search the infinite Web".

I wish them all the best and hope we can all start putting our eggs in more than one basket. Even if there where 2 major se's it would make running a website a lot less stressfull.

I agre with what chiyo was saying, it certainly does seam as if they are rolling out a Google clone. I hope they dont, I hope they keep it simple and uncluttered but they still need to show them selves as unique.

I think that a lot of the users then have lost are lost forever. They will really need to concentrate on getting new users. The people who went to Google from AV are very unlikely to return. AV needs to try and atract a new breed of users. Posibly run a massive brand awareness campaigne similar to the ones that have been run by lycos.

nutsandbolts

6:14 pm on Nov 9, 2002 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member



I've never had a "All indexes are unavailable; please try later" message from Altavista before... Yikes...

Eric_Jarvis

3:09 am on Nov 11, 2002 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member



they'll need far better search results if they want to make any sort of impact again...and I speak as somebody with second place on a very competitive single word search...I'm grateful and all that, but we are only there because a huge number of superb sites aren't indexed at all

bcc1234

6:15 am on Nov 12, 2002 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member



Got about 2.5k hits from scooter and still going.

vitaplease

9:09 am on Nov 12, 2002 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member



I noticed I got some "refreshed in past 48 hours" Google fresh lookalike tags next to my serps.. Did I miss something?

Also from yesterday to today, they added 10% more of site's my pages to their index.

Keep it going! Hasta la Vista!

nutsandbolts

9:45 am on Nov 12, 2002 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member



Yep - I've noticed that too. I must admit, their index is starting to shape up VERY nicely....

Tor

2:33 pm on Nov 12, 2002 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member



I`m noticing the same development from my part of the world. Looking very good so far!

vitaplease

7:52 am on Dec 11, 2002 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member



They had a nice start, but seems to me Altavista is not adding many more pages to their index as far as I can conclude.

TallTroll

10:27 am on Dec 11, 2002 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member



>> Altavista is not adding many more pages to their index

Seems to me that the algo should be the priority. Givent that virtually no one ever searches below a limit of, say, 100 results for just about any search term, size of index ought to take second place to quality of the returned results, regardless of their number. You don't need 3 billion URLs in your live index to return 30 quality results for most areas.

zeus

12:53 pm on Dec 11, 2002 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member



In last week they have made some more changes to there rankings, but not for the better.

zeus