Remember when we used to find things on the web by clicking through the Yahoo directory? It was a human-curated list of links, and it was getting impossible to keep up. I’ve spent many hours just wandering through categories, hoping to find a relevant page.
But Digital Equipment Corp (DEC) has just unveiled AltaVista, and it makes everything else look like a library card catalog in the age of computers.
Powered by Alpha
The secret to AltaVista’s speed isn't just clever software; it's the massive iron behind it. It's running on the latest DEC Alpha workstations-64-bit beasts that are light-years ahead of the typical Pentium or 68k.
For the first time, a search engine is actually crawling the entire web. Their "Scooter" bot is out there right now, indexing every word on every page it can find. They claim to have millions of pages indexed, and the search results come back in less than a second.
Full-Text Search
Unlike previous search engines that only looked at page titles or manually submitted keywords, AltaVista lets you search for anything.
# Searching for a specific error code
"ORA-00600"
# Boom. Instant links to forum posts and technical notes.
Is the Web Too Big?
Some people are worried that AltaVista is too powerful. They say we'll be overwhelmed by "noise." But to me, this is the first time the web has felt like a truly global resource. It’s no longer a collection of "cool links"; it’s a searchable database of human knowledge.
I wonder how long DEC will keep this up. They're primarily a hardware company, and AltaVista is mostly a showcase for their Alpha chips. But regardless of its future, they've set the standard. We now expect to be able to find anything, anywhere, instantly.