# AltaVista

24 Hacker News commenters recommended AltaVista and 14 criticized it, November 2025 to November 2026. It was recommended in 5 of 13 months.

**Verdict:** Fast, free search with real boolean operators, literal phrases and near and wildcard options that many miss today. Critics say results were noisy and took heavy sifting.

## Why people recommend it

- Best of the pre-Google engines (5 comments): "AltaVista was the best of the pre-Google search engines" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47983602)) "Altavista was the best of the bunch to my recollection" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48465700)) "the only really credible search engine prior to Google" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47983384))
- Advanced operators and literal search (4 comments): "Full boolean operator search with "literals" actually respected, negative search terms worked as advertised" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47983404)) "It had fairly sophisticated search options that Google never got like stem and wildcard searching." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47608626)) "I like boolean and literalism etc., I like control and syntactic precision" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47988410))
- Better results than modern search (3 comments): "It really seems that I was getting better, more-direct results from Altavista 30 years ago" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48422581)) "Alta Vista had more relevant search results than Google has now." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47983465)) "No modern search has ever matched that, again." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48364933))
- Free, fast and less cluttered (2 comments): "AltaVista was always super fast--it never had the advertising bloat that the other ones had until the very end." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48363884)) "Altavista was like the 'free' version of what some libraries had for via paid search subscriptions." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47993054))

## What people warn about

- Too many irrelevant results to sift (4 comments): "just doing keyword matching, and of course you would therefore have to wade through pages of results" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46149568)) "AltaVista required a lot of looking through results to find the right thing" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46136552)) "you'd have to dig into page 8 before getting to the good stuff" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46134299))
- Ranked below Google's results (4 comments): "It is absolutely insane to say that Altavista was better than Google though." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47984538)) "We all ditched AltaVista because Google was incredibly better." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47070900)) "Google search was way better than yahoo or altavista" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48460047))
- Cluttered with ads (2 comments): "Even the ads they had later were much cleaner compared to yahoo, altavista, lycos, aol" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49918835)) "a major reason for switching was that the search itself got cluttered up with ads" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47619577))
- Slower than rivals (2 comments): "Yahoo, Lycos, Excite, Alta-Vista were still loading" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48362748)) "Alta-Vista was visibly slower" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48380504))

## Alternatives hackers recommend

- [Google Search](https://hackerapproved.com/p/google-search.md): 315 recommend
- [Yandex Search](https://hackerapproved.com/p/yandex.md): 79 recommend
- [Marginalia Search](https://hackerapproved.com/p/marginalia-search.md): 50 recommend
- [Bing](https://hackerapproved.com/p/bing.md): 33 recommend
- [Ecosia](https://hackerapproved.com/p/ecosia.md): 24 recommend

## Cite as

Hacker Approved, "AltaVista", https://hackerapproved.com/p/altavista/ (counts from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026).