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Source for bad (spammed) Altavista results

MrSoda [PersonRank 0]

Saturday, August 12, 2006
17 years ago2,289 views

Hi everybody,

i have to write a article about search engines. In the introduction I mentioned the early search engines like Altavista and Excite. As everybody knows these search engines got less popular because they were full of spam and the users of these search engines weren't so happy with the results they got, so they went to Google.
Now i'm trying to find a "good" source for the "Spam results in Altavista"-thing and that the users were not satisfied with the results they got from Altavista.

Does anyone know any book, research paper or "trustworthy" URL where this is mentioned ?

Philipp Lenssen [PersonRank 10]

17 years ago #

The reason I switched from AltaVista to Google initially was that AltaVista started to clutter their homepage, and even show popup ads. That's when people left. Of course, Google's result were also much better at the time. I believe the books The Search by John Battelle and The Google Story by David Vise cover this topic. I don't remember specific results in AltaVista at that time (around 1999, I guess), though apparently you had to wade through dozens of results to get something relevant... the index was easy to spam with meta keyword repetitions, for example.

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