From the article: "[Alta Vista] broadened the use of boolean operators in search. Like some competing search engines, it supported AND, OR, and NOT."
My recollection is that Alta Vista supported boolean operators, but defaulted to OR while Google defaulted to AND. So searching Alta Vista for something like "$CommonWord $UncommonWord" would return results with high-ranking pages for $CommonWord that drown out all the low-scoring pages for $UncommonWord, whereas Google would return results that match the intersection (which would actually be relevant to the user's query). I'm convinced this default might have made a bigger impact on Google's success than any PageRank magic.
Although it's very much anecdotical, I, too, distinctly remember that Google defaulted to AND (unlike today, a very hard AND at the time), and that this made a noticeable difference in searching habits.
My theory on why this might matter even for people who knew how to use the operators is this: With OR as default, you would first try your query without operators, get page upon page of irrelevant results, and then start to narrow your query down. With AND as the default, you would type in the query, and if you only got a few irrelevant results, or often no results at all, you would try alternative terms instead.
It seems that progressing from no result to desired results by choosing alternative terms just makes more sense than having to wade through irrelevant stuff, and the default encourages one methodology over the other.
Today, it's very hard to make Google return no results at all. Not just because the amount of content grew to an unimaginable scale in the meantime, but also because Google has become way, way fuzzier in the way it interprets search terms, likely to better suit a larger and different audience. A lot of times today, I have to switch to "verbatim" mode first, at least for technical stuff.
The problem with AND as a default is that 'normal' people (i.e. people who have no idea what boolean means) operate search engines something like this: 1. type some words in, and get no or incorrect results; 2. add some extra words, and repeat the search, with the idea they are making the search more specific; 3. be confused as to why they still don't get the results they want. a default of OR, on the other hand, means adding search terms ends up being useful...
As someone old enough to have used search engines extensively myself and watching over others using it during the AV - Google transition, I can definitely say that defaulting to AND was one of the most important reasons Google appeared to give better results than AV for both advanced and basic folk.
Defaulting to AND means that you aren't just searching for the most common term in your query that drowns out the rest. Also, adding terms narrows the query down rather than making it more general. This behavior strikes me as far more natural for "normal" people.
sure, i agree, except that they also apply this 'narrowing down' logic when insufficient or no results are returned, thinking the query needs to be more specific in order to work. i have observed the following sort of behaviour:
1. entering 'invisible marmalade teapot' and getting no results
2. changing to 'invisible marmalade teapot with tartan cosy', again nothing
3. so 'invisible marmalade teapot with tartan cosy in outer space', ditto
you get the idea...? it's just like in the real world, when you might go to a bookshop and say
You: do you have that new crime novel in stock?
Bookseller: er, i don't know which one you mean?
Y: the new crime novel by john grisham, pelican something or other?
B: oh, right, yes, here it is!
and everyone is happy.
default OR in a search engine would mean my first example eventually starting to return results about transparent space coffee pots with tartan cosies, ignoring the first few terms but the rest match, which is often helpful, particularly if you're doing an exploratory search for something where you aren't sure of the exact details.
Hm. I think perhaps a better way of putting it is that the hard AND issue is when people search using a natural language type query (I know about stop words, assume these are always filtered out) and include some extraneous term, so 'What is that new crime novel by John Grisham about a Penguin I think?' will return nothing, and no amount of extra terms added at the end will help, until you delete 'Penguin'... Of course it's anecdotal, but I still suspect it's one of the reasons for the hard AND to OR switch...
As of the past 2 weeks Amazon's search feels like "we're not even going to try to get close anymore and aren't even going to show you matches that contain the words you're looking for, here are some random stuff plus some things you looked at recently".
Yes, easily discoverable from the links under the search box as Tools -> All Results -> Verbatim. Ignore the sign about the leopard, I think that's just left over from some other project.
No, it refers to verbatim mode, which ensures every word in the search is on (almost) every page found. (You would think google works like this by default, but in practise, very far from it) Using quotes around the search terms ensure they appear in the quoted order.
To switch on Verbatim, I click "Verbatim" on the left side of the google page, it appears just under the alternative, "All results". I think for other systems it can be well hidden in menus. I use it almost every time I google anything. Otherwise you get a load of irrelevant crap.
I've long believed that default OR in keyword searches is always a mistake, and the default should always be AND.
The reason being you can just search twice if you want either word, but in the vast majority of cases you want both words when you enter them in the searchbox. Most companies kind of split the difference and put the AND results first then fill in with OR results, but that mostly just leads to "if your answer isn't on the first page, it's not going to be on the second or the hundredth".
I had an ISP at the time, and remember teaching users to always search on AV using "keyword1 AND keyword2", to get the results they expected. When Google came around, this became unnecessary.
IMO this was one of the biggest contributors to the perceived quality advantage of Google vs AV.
It’s not always a mistake. The OR or AND just provides initial filter and then you get to rank pages and take top N. If your ranking algorithm put a lot of weight on the fact that all words exist then you can get same result as AND but with benefit that if no page exist then you may suggest something. It also depends on how you present these results.
Alta Vista defaulted to AND. Crappy search engines like Excite defaulted to OR because it's easier to serve up a lot of low quality results in an OR search. Moreover Alta Vista had "NEAR" which made it unique among search engines.
It always took 2 to 5 searches using Altavista to get the results you were looking for. This was a huge improvement on Excite and Lycos which might produce infinite results with absolutely nothing relevant. There was a lot of noise like source code archives. With Google search the first page usually had a useful result.
Probably the biggest thing that destroyed Alta Vista was the horrible flashing banner Ads at the top of the screen.
My recollection is that Alta Vista supported boolean operators, but defaulted to OR while Google defaulted to AND. So searching Alta Vista for something like "$CommonWord $UncommonWord" would return results with high-ranking pages for $CommonWord that drown out all the low-scoring pages for $UncommonWord, whereas Google would return results that match the intersection (which would actually be relevant to the user's query). I'm convinced this default might have made a bigger impact on Google's success than any PageRank magic.