Altavista redesigns.

February 3, 2001 1:59 PM

Altavista redesigns. Again. Seems they're trying a Yahoo/DMOZ feel this time, with LookSmart results as their directory. Didn't they do this once before?
posted by danwalker (13 comments total)

Yeah, Succa posted a link to the redesign on MetaFilter last July which started off a good thread of comments.
posted by tomalak at 2:34 PM on February 3, 2001

I liked AltaVista way back in the days of 1998, but really don't find any reason to visit them anymore. The only thing they still have that draws me back from time to time is BabelFish, and even that doesn't spit out the greatest translations.
posted by tomorama at 2:54 PM on February 3, 2001

How boring, I mean come on, if you're going to bother redesigning then lets see something worth while, some kind of new interface or taxonomy.

Sigh. The Internet is becoming a brown paper bag.
posted by Brilliantcrank at 3:17 PM on February 3, 2001

I'd like to know how many people and meetings were required to decide upon that "new look."
posted by gluechunk at 4:18 PM on February 3, 2001

Or a beer bottle with "XXX"
posted by owillis at 9:18 PM on February 3, 2001

The look may be vanilla, but perhaps this redesign is a good thing. They've dropped their aspirations of being a portal, something they never did very well, and this redesign puts search front and center, literally. Now that they're concentrating on the search engine, hopefully they'll work on improving its results.
posted by Aaaugh! at 1:54 AM on February 4, 2001

Does anyone like a front page with more than say fifty links on it?
posted by fullerine at 5:49 AM on February 4, 2001

It's a lot less confusing than it was.

That's the only good thing I have to say.
posted by gleemax at 6:15 PM on February 4, 2001

At least Yahoo is a lot easier to understand. When I load the ICQ page, I have absolutely no clue where I'm supposed to look. It's just a bunch of columns with text and links, with nothing that jumps out at my eye and yells "look here first!". I didn't even go so far as to read any of what was on the page. Another case of Way Too Much Information.
posted by tomorama at 6:56 PM on February 4, 2001

That ICQ site is completely baffling to me... Suffice to say, it only gets worse the deeper down their page heirarchy you go. We were using the ICQ client in an R&D thing, and I ended up bookmarking individual pages all over their site because in many, many cases there was one and only one (nonintuitive and frequently unlabelled) path to that page. It's a miracle ICQ users connect to each other at all, considering how unusable this site is coupled with how heinous the UI of their actual client product is.
posted by m.polo at 7:25 PM on February 4, 2001

A beer bottle w/ "XXX" has broad iconic significance. I hope the "portal" never reaches that level of recognizablity.
posted by sonofsamiam at 7:30 PM on February 4, 2001

Is there an archive of the various Yahoo! designs anywhere that anyone knows of? (I know, I know, what various designs? That's the point--I want to look at how Yahoo has tweaked their interface without really changing their basic look.)
posted by rodii at 6:28 AM on February 5, 2001