Products · Product
AltaVista
Raised as a usability problem by 15 people on Hacker News over 13 years (2008–2020), in 12 threads.
No issue was raised by at least 3 people in 3 threads this year.
No issue was raised by at least 3 people in 3 threads in the last 5 years.
Every issue, all time, most people first
Must learn complex query operators for specific resultsUnreviewed
20082026- Users had to learn complex query operators to get specific search results2016-09-06
- Users had to dig through pages and pages of results to find what they wanted2015-09-18
- Needed advanced syntax and paging through results to find the right stuff2012-04-05
Unreviewed issues were grouped by machine: Claude Haiku labelled each comment as a usability complaint, named what it's about and summed up the problem in a line, and a small model grouped similar problems. Nobody has checked them by hand. Expect mistakes.
The newest 16 complaints
- Became slower and bloated over time, making searches harder to use2020-12-19
- Search results became so full of paid links and ads it was unusable2020-12-19
- Pages took up to 30 seconds to load, making it nearly unusable2020-12-19
- Frustrating because searches couldn't find what the user wanted, so they switched to Google2019-02-15
- Generic queries return overwhelming numbers of random, irrelevant pages2019-02-15
- Searches return endless pages of loosely related links, hard to find what you want2019-02-15
- Crowded, graphics-heavy page made the search bar hard to find and slow to load2017-03-26
- Users had to learn complex query operators to get specific search results2016-09-06
- Users had to dig through pages and pages of results to find what they wanted2015-09-18
- Users had to click into the search text box before typing2013-07-01
- Needed advanced syntax and paging through results to find the right stuff2012-04-05
- Regular users couldn't get good results without knowing operators like +term, -term, and quotes2011-11-01
- Simple search required clicking five buttons through advanced search2011-07-23
- Results were random pages containing the term, requiring wading through many pages2011-01-13
- Flashing ads and sponsored links bury the actual search results2010-02-09
- Good sites found once could not be found again by searching2008-07-28