“ Those who deny freedom to others deserve it not for themselves.”

Abraham Lincoln

#108 Shattered Vistas Revisited


Our April column brough a whole flood of email response from readers. Among the dozens and dozens of emails that arrived for several days after the #107 edition hit the streets, were all kinds of folks from webmasters to corporate managers to just ‘folks’. Not one of the posts agreed with the Altavista position that search results should be sold on the auction block. More than just a few however had a tone of defeat, mentioning that “there’s nothing anyone can do.”

Random sampling of the email we received. . .

Hank S says:
What do you expect?
They are in the business of making money, and what better way to make money than sell "product". Of course, this makes their search engine suspect, but I don't blame them. Unfortunately, this may turn into an epidemic (pandemic?) and we could view all search engines as bogus.
Dave S says
Yahoo too?
I heard recently that Yahoo is also taking money as a means of guaranteeing placement in a certain position in their listings? Is this true? And if it is, what do we do to combat this money grubbing behavior?
D. Burkhar says:
I agree, it's a pretty scummy thing for Altavista to do.
How long do you think it would be until surfers got tired of getting junk returns and went to another search engine? Frankly, I think if they carry this through, it will spell the end of Altavista. And if the other major search engines pick up on the tactic, it will only open the door for some smaller players. Guess we'll see.
K. Uenzli says:
Hasta La Vista Alta Vista
Search engines are notoriously random. Nobody has found the magic search engine that returns every persons specific desires at the top of the queue, but when a search engine allows payments by web sites in order to place them high at the queue, they cease to be a search engine and become an advertising medium. I've been to Altavista for the last time. Good-bye Altavista. It matters not a whit to me whether Altavista flourishes or flounders. It's been relegated to the myriad of web sites I simply drop from my bookmarks and forget.
M. Freiman says:
Simply stop using Altavista.
yep, I've got comments. My searches, as anyone doing graphics knows, rarely are after big, moneyed sources. I'm after the little guy with the cool patterns, brushes, masks, backgrounds and digital images. My wife is after the little guy with the needle arts resources. If my searches start to hit the big sites with the cash, the relevancy for me is gone and, thus, so will AV be as a tool.
I'm just now beginning to appreciate the usefulness of relative newcomers:
Northern Light http://www.northernlight.com/power.html
inferenceFind http://infindv2.infind.com/infind.rdc
Feel free to forward this letter to AV. Thanks for the pointer and please do let us know if you find an actual point of contact for Alta Vista.
J. Aburg says simply:
That retching sound is me refusing to swallow that (omitted).
Rick S says
Too Bad
I really liked AltaVista. But if they want to go to hell, fine, they can go to hell. I'll stop using it. Just knowing that Compaq, who will sell you any old piece of dog (omitted) they can put together, owns AV, tells one that it's gonna get screwed up sooner or later anyway, so what are you gonna do?
A Peck says:
AltaVista's decline began several months ago in my opinion.
It used to be my engine of choice and slowly it began churning up useless sites and way to much blinking, manipulative advertisements. It's too bad, but I have faith that there will always remain some who are commited to providing a decent search engine. Thanks for your article.
J. Harris says:
You're right, it's a sad and sick reflection
I've been working with SE placement for over two years now and have seen this coming for quite awhile. You're right, it's a sad and sick reflection of where the web is headed, right down the toilet with the rest of our society. The web was very promising in it's early days, and I still believe it's the most democratizing human creation since the printing press. It's still possible for ANYONE to put up a web page. The only problem now is that nobody will know it's there, because it's lost among the ringing bells and flashing lights of the Madison Avenue culture that has taken control of the big pipes.
What's neccesary now is a champion of the little guy, a "Search Engine Classic", that refuses to take submissions from commercial sites and concentrates on the technical, informative, interesting, personal type pages that make the web such an amazing thing, the ones that built the web in the first place. Done right, it wouldn't take long for such a site to take off, because word gets around on the net quickly. Then maybe at least there would be an alternative, somewhere you could search without having to wade through the million dollar billboards of the Fortune 1000. How many people remember, or even know, that the original charter for the Internet expressly forbid advertising and commercial ventures?

At Webspeed, things move fast and memories are short.

Comments? Anyone got comments?

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