AltaVista – Why did Altavista search engine lose ground so quickly to Google?
From the standpoint of information retrieval, Altavista and earlier search engines adapted the principles that had been developed since the 1960’s to do automatic searching on large bodies of information. Several information retrieval theories had been developed (principally Boolean, vector, and probabilistic) starting especially with Gerard Salton at Cornell and Bill Maron at UC Berkeley for how to do automatic indexing/retrieval.
These techniques had to do with manipulating and processing the text in documents, assigning probabilities to words, and retrieving and ranking results based on these algorithms. Retrieved results would be output according to rank, based on scores received in the processing. These techniques became much more refined over the decades.
The early search engines adapted the classical information retrieval techniques to Internet searching.
What the Google founders recognized about search on the Web was that information about LINKS could be added to the algorithms. (Obviously, links didn’t exist in traditional databases containing, say, lists of engineering or biology publications.) Links are, in effect, another kind of indexing altogether. Web page authors link to related material, and often to very carefully and consciously selected related material. This link information could be wrapped into the search algorithms to improve the accuracy of retrieval. Their approach enabled the classic IR algorithms to be supplemented, enriched, and made more accurate by using the additional network connections made available by Web page developers.
Google’s techniques were a HUGE boost to classical IR methods. Whatever other business and company management issues Altavista faced, it was the last of the old style information retrieval engines.