Same, at one point the size of AltaVista's index was vastly above all the competition and was the best place to go for finding obscure stuff. With the boolean filters it was possible to exhaustively search the web.
Unfortunately that didn't scale with the size of the web; at one point the amount of pages got large enough that doing a smart ranking like Google did became more effective than the "look at all pages of results" usage required for AltaVista. It felt like a monumental transition, like when a program gets too big for main memory and causes the computer to start swapping to disk.
Unfortunately that didn't scale with the size of the web; at one point the amount of pages got large enough that doing a smart ranking like Google did became more effective than the "look at all pages of results" usage required for AltaVista. It felt like a monumental transition, like when a program gets too big for main memory and causes the computer to start swapping to disk.