Reply #2: Altavista has sort of sucked since 1998. [View All]

[Spider Jerusalem]

I still miss the early Altavista....back when the url was still altavista.digital.com and you could use expanded Boolean phrases such as ADJ (finding a word adjacent to another), etc...the 1995-mid-1998 version of AV is STILL my all-time favourite search engine. But then they had to change the format...I still remember the surprise. Go to AltaVista, and there's new text over the search bar: "Ask AltaVista A Question", and search worked differently...I wanted to ask "Why do you suck now?"

That drove me to switch to HotBot for searching, and for the past few years now I've pretty much stuck with Google.