The real masthead, 7,324 bytes of GIF across five files, at the pixel widths the 1997 page declared on every tag.
A real 1997 banner, 468 by 60, three frames, 9,133 bytes,
in the slot ad.doubleclick.net filled.
Tip: To control how your Web site is indexed, check out the Help for the proper use of the META tag. Quoted off the AltaVista homepage, 11 May 1996. It is telling you to do the thing this plate is about.
One of these pages is yours: http://pink.poodle.org/, currently
near the bottom for dog grooming.
Get it to number one without changing a word the page says. Open Edit its head in the bar at the bottom and put words into its META tags.
Only sixteen pages are indexed, so try words they hold: dog grooming, groom*, Palo Alto, +grooming -cat. Usenet is not implemented.
14 documents matching, sorted by how many indexed instances of your words each one holds. AltaVista's own results header is not in any capture reachable from here, so this line is the plate's.
- 1. Clip 'n' Clean Dog Grooming http://www.clipnclean.com/
-
Dog grooming, by appointment, six days a week.
http://www.clipnclean.com/ - size 8k - 11 Jan 97 dog: title 1x6 + keywords 13x3 + description 1x3 + body 4x1 = 52 | grooming: title 1x6 + keywords 13x3 + description 1x3 + body 3x1 = 51 = 103
- 2. Mobile Dog Grooming Van Services http://www.groomvan.net/
-
Dog grooming, in your driveway.
http://www.groomvan.net/ - size 5k - 08 Dec 96 dog: title 1x6 + description 1x3 + body 2x1 = 11 | grooming: title 1x6 + description 1x3 + body 2x1 = 11 = 22
- 3. The Dog Grooming FAQ, Part 1 of 3 http://www.k9faq.org/groom1.html
-
This FAQ covers dog grooming at home. Brushing, bathing, drying, clipping and nail care...
http://www.k9faq.org/groom1.html - size 44k - 02 Aug 96 dog: title 1x6 + body 3x1 = 9 | grooming: title 1x6 + body 4x1 = 10 = 19
- 4. Palo Alto Pet Directory: Grooming http://www.papets.com/dir/grooming.html
-
Groomers in Palo Alto, listed by street.
http://www.papets.com/dir/grooming.html - size 6k - 17 Sep 96 dog: keywords 1x3 + body 1x1 = 4 | grooming: title 1x6 + keywords 1x3 + body 4x1 = 13 = 17
- 5. The Complete Guide to Dog Nutrition http://www.dognutrition.com/guide.html
-
What to feed a dog and how much of it. Protein, fat, and the...
http://www.dognutrition.com/guide.html - size 61k - 30 Jun 96 dog: title 1x6 + keywords 2x3 + body 2x1 = 14 | grooming: body 1x1 = 1 = 15
- 6. Grooming Supplies Wholesale Catalog http://www.groomsupply.com/catalog.html
-
Wholesale grooming supplies for the trade.
http://www.groomsupply.com/catalog.html - size 34k - 21 May 96 dog: keywords 1x3 = 3 | grooming: title 1x6 + keywords 1x3 + description 1x3 = 12 = 15
- 7. The Dog House Bar and Grill http://www.doghousegrill.com/
-
Burgers, wings and a jukebox. The Dog House has been on Fourth Street since...
http://www.doghousegrill.com/ - size 5k - 16 Nov 96 dog: title 1x6 + keywords 1x3 + body 2x1 = 11 | grooming: 0 = 0 = 11
- 8. Cat Grooming and You http://www.catgroom.org/
-
Cats groom themselves, mostly. The long haired ones need help. This page is about...
http://www.catgroom.org/ - size 7k - 09 Oct 96 dog: body 2x1 = 2 | grooming: title 1x6 + body 2x1 = 8 = 10
- 9. Pink Poodles Inc http://pink.poodle.org/
-
We specialize in grooming pink poodles.
http://pink.poodle.org/ - size 3k - 29 Feb 96 dog: keywords 1x3 = 3 | grooming: keywords 1x3 + description 1x3 = 6 = 9
- 10. Bay Area Dog Owners Association http://www.badoa.org/
-
Meetings the second Tuesday. Off leash park news, the dog license ordinance, and a...
http://www.badoa.org/ - size 12k - 04 Nov 96 dog: title 1x6 + body 2x1 = 8 | grooming: body 1x1 = 1 = 9
- 11. Dog Training Classes, Peninsula http://www.peninsuladogs.com/classes.html
-
Six week obedience classes. Bring a hungry dog and a short leash. We do...
http://www.peninsuladogs.com/classes.html - size 9k - 12 Jul 96 dog: title 1x6 + body 1x1 = 7 | grooming: body 1x1 = 1 = 8
- 12. Standard Poodle Rescue of Northern California http://www.spr-norcal.org/
-
We place standard poodles in homes. A poodle needs grooming every six weeks, which...
http://www.spr-norcal.org/ - size 15k - 23 Mar 96 dog: keywords 1x3 + body 1x1 = 4 | grooming: body 1x1 = 1 = 5
- 13. Breed Standards: The Poodle http://www.breedstandards.net/poodle.html
-
The poodle coat is curly and dense. Show grooming follows one of three clips....
http://www.breedstandards.net/poodle.html - size 22k - 14 Feb 96 dog: 0 = 0 | grooming: body 1x1 = 1 = 1
- 14. Pet Photography by Appointment http://www.petpics.net/
-
Portraits of your animal, in the studio or at your house. Have the dog...
http://www.petpics.net/ - size 4k - 05 Apr 96 dog: body 1x1 = 1 | grooming: 0 = 0 = 1
- Veterinary Clinic Hours and Directions http://www.midpenvet.com/hours.html
-
Open weekdays eight to six, Saturday mornings. We are on the corner. Parking behind...
http://www.midpenvet.com/hours.html - size 3k - 28 Aug 96 dog: 0 = 0 | grooming: 0 = 0 = 0
- Cool Site of the Day http://cool.infi.net/
-
Cool Site of the Day, is a wildly popular Internet site that features interesting, provocative, and irreverent web sites from around the world.
http://cool.infi.net/ - size 4k - 26 Dec 96 dog: 0 = 0 | grooming: 0 = 0 = 0
Two of the sixteen are real: Pink Poodles Inc is AltaVista's own worked example, verbatim, and Cool Site of the Day is a 1996 capture with only its META fields kept.
Number one, and you did what you were told.
The same site, on two of its own pages, in the same month:
addurl_meta.htm: It is however possible for you to control how your page is indexed by using the META tag to specify both additional keywords to index, and a short description.
addurl.htm: The usual technique is to submit pages with numerous keywords, or with keywords unrelated to the real content of the pages. We strongly discourage the use of these techniques. AltaVista is an index, not a repository for pages of low or misleading informational value.
One page is the instruction, the other is the accusation, and nothing published between them says how many keywords is numerous. The line was drawn by hand, at Digital, page by page, and you could not read it before you crossed it.
- FIELD MARKS
-
HOT:
Small caps faked by hand, per word.
A<font size=-1>LTA</font>V<font size=-1>ISTA</font>, applied to every proper noun in body copy. The heading above this list is doing it.
COOL: size Nk in the result metadata. The byte size of the page, printed next to the date, because in 1997 that was a load time estimate and 44k was a decision you made before clicking.
FREE: A result density selector. Standard, Compact, Detailed, sitting in the chrome beside the query box. No engine has offered you that control since.
DILBERT: Semantic labels as hard-coded font colors. Four of them on one homepage, in four different hexes, the meaning carried entirely by the color and the word. This line is one of them.
HOT: Surprise, in the footer, between Legal and FAQ. A random result button, shipped as standard, filed next to the terms of service.
- THE MACHINE
- Sixteen AlphaServer 8400 5/440s, twelve processors and 8 GB of memory each, holding an index of more than 200 GB. A spider called Scooter bringing back about six million pages a day over a 100 megabit link out of Digital's Palo Alto gateway. In under four months the index went from 30 million pages on 275,600 servers to 31 million pages on 627,000 servers. A million more pages, and more than twice as many machines serving them.
- WHAT IT COST
- The rules were published, they fitted on one page, and you could satisfy them by yourself. Nobody had to vouch for you and nothing had to link to you first. Google's answer was to stop trusting the document and start trusting the crowd, which killed the stuffing and, in the same move, made being new a disqualification. Marginalia is live now, AGPL, and puts Explore in the nav as a peer of Search. It opens with a banner addressed to users of text based browsers, pointing at a front end that works in Lynx. Checked today: still there.
Surprise pulled a word out of the index and searched it. A random result button, shipped as standard, sitting in the footer next to Legal.
Copyright 1996 Digital Equipment Corporation. All rights reserved. That is the real footer line, and the masthead above it is their real artwork, recovered from the 1997 capture and served from this origin rather than hotlinked. The palette is theirs too:
<body bgcolor="#ffffff" text="#000000" link="#0000ee" vlink="551a8b" alink="ff0000">
Look at vlink and alink. No hash. A page
serving 31 million queries a weekday shipped with malformed color attributes and every browser coped.
How this ranks, and where it stops. Digital published what the indexer stored: every word, every instance, capitalization included. It never published how those were weighted, the ranking help page is a 404 in every capture, and no results page was ever archived. So the weights here are this plate's invention, not Digital's. Title 6, META keyword or description 3, body 1: documented signals, made up numbers, picked so editing your title beats padding keywords. The Detailed form shows the sum field by field. Results in 1997 were not numbered.
From the Add URL page: Do not submit a description or keywords with
a URL. To control the abstract served back with your page, use META tags.
The editor is open at the bottom
of the window.
Also from the Add URL page: We will disallow URL submissions from
those who spam the index. In extreme cases, we will exclude all their pages from the index.
The brake
existed. It was a person reading your page and deciding.
Quoted from the Simple Query help: a word is any string of letters and
digits
separated by white space or punctuation, which is exactly how the box counts. Use only lower case
unless you want your search to be case sensitive.
Try Palo Alto against
palo alto. An asterisk broadens, so groom* catches groomer and grooming. A plus
requires a word and a minus throws out any page holding it.
Text-Only was a real link on that footer. The masthead is now the alt text the 1997 markup carried, at the same widths, which is what a reader browsing with images off actually got. Press it again to bring the artwork back.