i don't know precisely the architectures they both used (i tend not to study things that are changing and over which i have no control), but here's what I would say:

I like boolean and literalism etc., I like control and syntactic precision, and I did not prefer google when it first got traction and buzz, but within six months of that, google's "page ranked" back-end database was clearly superior to what altavista's front-end queries could do with their own back end data.

it shocked me when people I thought I knew well would say "I always hit google's "I feel lucky" to go straight to the top search result. Me, I prefer to pore through results looking for nuance and to fine tune my query. google was giving me much better results to look at, even if I had less control for fine tuning. Google has relentlessly over time diminished literalism in queries in favor of mass market popularity. As an overly simplistic example, when I look up Thor, I am never interested in any film or who was in it, and that's pretty much all you get now. Alexander the Great is an incredible figure from history, shaping the geo landscape in ways that still affect us today, but searchwise he's just a fictionalized portrayal by a celebrity who don't even have his own authenticity.

> None of that ever worked properly, consistently, at google.

My experience is it worked pretty well on Google for a while, but then it got progressively worse.

Agreed. AltaVista was the best of the pre-Google search engines. I seem to remember Google having negative terms, literals and booleans (at least or/and) - although they weren't well documented, they worked. Amazon had literals and negative terms too for many years. Now searching on both of those sites is "search theater", where they pretend to give targeted results while burying the result you're looking for just deep enough to maximize page views before too many users bounce.

I fucking hate we now live in a world where leading companies A/B test precisely how much they can degrade their core product value and annoy users knowing they're safe from competitors because startups know if they threaten Google/Amazon on that stuff they'll just put back the minimum functionality long enough to ensure the new player dies.

I would think that 90% of the principals at DEC/Compaq WRL working on AltaVista would have moved to google, their first office was nearby in downtown Palo Alto back in 1999.

The "near" operator was gold.

It is absolutely insane to say that Altavista was better than Google though.

Try Kagi, it implements them quite well.

It worked pretty well on early google and altavista. Find an archive of searchlores.org from that era and see for yourself. +Fravia had documented and tested the features quite thoroughly

I think they also allowed distance between words (within x) to increase relevance.