The Mystery of AltaVista - can anyone solve it???

[! search-engines-web]

First generation Search Engine Users may remember that in the late 1990s,
AltaVista had great SERPs - there was much spam - but you could find virtually everything you needed by the third page, by just using their bolean operators...

It was the Search Engine of choice for techies and researchers - as Google is today ...(Yahoo was more for the consumer - back then)


But SUDDENLY, one day in 1999, ALTAVISTA just completely changed their Algos - there was suddenly an extreme drop in relevance and number of sites indexed....


Slowly, in 2000 people turned to AlltheWeb and Dogpile and Google
- then Google finally won out by the end of the year....

If anyone worked at AltaVista back then, could you please explain that mysterious permanent ALGO change.

[Old Welsh Guy]

Google came along with more or less built in automatic boolean searching, and stole the show.