Altavista Vs Google

I can't remember having a strong Search Engine loyalty before AltaVista.

Why I became a loyal AltaVista user:

• results were "good" and fast

• but more important: it indexed more pages in total, more pages per site, and it added them faster

  • I became aware of this because of producing content - it was frustrating to know that you had new content, but that someone searching for that kind of content on a public Search Engine wouldn't find it for months. And might not ever find it, because engines often had de-facto limits on how many pages they'd include (other scenario: a new "article" would show up in an engine, but an old "classic" article would suddenly disappear).

  • but having this knowledge made you annoyed as a reader because you had this nasty feeling on other engines of "what are they not showing me?"

Why I switched to Google

• results quality was a little better

• speed was a little better

• most important: they passed AltaVista in index size and timeliness

Both had benefit of not tarting up their results pages with Banner Ad-s.