AltaVista was actually pretty good if you knew how to use its search operators. Google just enabled search for the masses so to speak. A bit like the iPhone of search engines.
AltaVista was great until they quit running the crawler for a few months - I gave up when I searched something and the first 10 results were dead links. I'm told they got it running again just after I left, but I never looked back to see. (there is a lesson here)
