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AltaVista Search Researcher Recalls Days Of End User 'Technical Support'

Posted by Charles Babcock, May 8, 2007 05:38 PM

Louis Monier, one of the original search engine researchers who is still tackling search-related work at Google, has a story to tell about the early days of the AltaVista search engine. Monier was the head of the development team, and one of his motives for wanting to keep AltaVista's index of the World Wide Web up to date was to keep his developers free from support calls.

In those days, people knew other search engines only indexed part of the Web but AltaVista boasted that it had indexed the whole web. That's why, when someone couldn't find a link that had appeared in their AltaVista search, they called the AltaVista team for technical support.

Monier says he was trying to make AltaVista the describer of the Web. By coming up with a total count of sites and pages, he could make AltaVista the focal point of the Internet's growth.

"We got a lot of feedback. Some people like to complain; users are allowed to complain," he recalls, but his staff was kept busy trouble shooting problematic URLs. "One of the big motivations to crawl often [generating a new index of the Web] was to minimize those calls."

One of those unwanted callers was me.

I remember sometime in 1996 being told that if you couldn't find a page you wanted, you could call AltaVista and they'd help you locate it. I didn't believe this, so of course I tried it. And sure enough, a search engine developer, whose time I should not have been wasting, played customer service representative and used Scooter to update the link.

I was amazed that anyone had the wherewithal to fix non-operative URLs on the sprawling, fast growing World Wide Web. And the devotion to search to do it for randomly calling customers. What a search engine team, I thought at the time. There's no stopping them. We all know the rest of that story.

One other note on Greatest Web Software Ever Written: When I said Craigslist consists of 100,000 lines of Perl, that was shorthand for the custom part of the site. Craigslist runs on top of Linux, the Apache Web Server, the MySQL database plus 100,000 lines of Perl. It's Craigslist version of the open source LAMP stack.

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