Techies: WTF happened to AltaVista advanced search?

[qb]

This search engine used to be so great I had it as my home page for years. I could really narrow down searches using "near" in addition to the other boolean terms. I could also use a semicolon as a "sticky space" to join phrases (it's quicker than using quotes, and it also finds words joined by a dash or other punctuation rather than a space).

Now, however, "near" and semicolons no longer work, and boolean terms are suddenly case sensitive.

AltaVista has gone from the best to the worst. Does anyone know what happened?

[felonious thunk]

1. Google happened

Everyone just stopped using AltaVista, and it never got the word of mouth that Google did. I agree though, before Google, Altavista was the best search engine, but it wasn't able to compete with Yahoo back then, and Google came along and basically killed it. I'm actually surprised that they are even still around, given that I'm sure they don't have much money to work with anymore.

[Spider Jerusalem]

2. Altavista has sort of sucked since 1998.

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.