AltaVista
Alta Vista is a fast, powerful search engine with enough bells and whistles to do an extremely complex search, but first you have to master all its options. If you're serious about Web searching, however, mastering Alta Vista is a wise policy.
Type of search: Keyword
Search options: Simple or Advanced search, search refining.
Domains searched: Web, Usenet
Search refining: Boolean "AND," "OR" and "NOT," plus the proximal locator "NEAR." Allows wildcards and "backwards" searching (i.e., you can find all the other web sites that link to another page). You can decide how search terms should be weighed, and where in the document to look for them. Powerful search refining tools, and the more refining you do, the better your results are.
Relevance ranking: Ranks according to how many of your search terms a page contains, where in the document, and how close to one another the search terms are.
Results presented as: First several lines of document. "Detailed" summaries don't appear any more detailed than "standard" ones.
User interface: Reasonably good, but not very friendly to the casual user. Advanced query now allows you to further refine your search at the end of each results page. You can also visit specialized zones or channels in areas like finance, travel, news.
Help files: Complete, but confusing. Too much thrown at you at once. More clarity and more explanation of options would be appreciated!
Good points: Fast searches, capitalization and proper nouns recognized, largest database; finds things others don't. Alta Vista searches both the Web and Usenet. It will search on both words and on phrases, including names and titles. You can even search to discover how many people have linked their site to yours. You can also have the resulting pages of your searches translated into several other languages.
Bad points: Multiple pages from the same site show up too frequently; some curious relevancy rankings, especially on Simple search.
Overall Rating: A-
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29th January 2007, 02:22 AM
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