Alta Vista Search Engine | Internet Prospector

March 1997
Internet Prospector

Alta Vista
Ah -- the view from atop the highest mountain -- stunning, breathtaking, and often overwhelming. Alta Vista was well-named. It is an extremely user-friendly search engine, with help screens that are easy to access from the top of any page.

Alta Vista looks for words -- defining" words" as any combination of letters or numbers that anyone has put on a web page. It does not index punctuation, and treats punctuation as a white space.

Simply Query is the default search -- you can type in your query in plain English, or, you can use quotes, + and - operators for "and" and "not", or a wildcard *. Advanced Query allows the use of operators such as AND, OR, NEAR and NOT and parentheses to combine search terms. Both let you restrict your searches to various fields, which include title, link, image and domain. You can also search USENET news groups.

Also, an Advanced Query will let you specify a term on which to rank your results.

Results are ranked according to a score. A document with your search terms in the beginning of the document, close to each other, or appearing more than once will be scored and ranked higher. Standard results are shown in about a 20-word field. You can also choose to see your results in a compact, one-line form.

Live Topics is the newest addition to Alta Vista's features, and it is incredible to, in an instant, see your 100,000 results categorized into a handful of terms which you can further refine by omitting or including.

If you choose "Visual Live Topics," you get an applet that creates a page for you. It's undeniably cool, but I wonder what the point is, since except for the visuals of the page, it is identical to the html table in the standard Live Topics page.

When I used Alta Vista to search for Ben & Jerry's co-founder Ben Cohen, in a plain, unadorned simple search, I was rewarded with 100,000 hits - but first up was Ben Cohen's bio from the Ben & Jerry's site. However, the second hit was some undergraduate's home page. Surrounding "ben cohen" in quotation marks limited my resulting hits to 300, but, again, that undergraduate came in second, and the true hits were sparse compared to the false. The first SEC document, from Ben & Jerry's home page, came in at # 22.

The cream rose to the top after I further narrowed my search to +"ben cohen" +"ice cream". The first 20 hits of the 3000 found were relevant to Ben of Ben & Jerry's. After that were some unrelated but still tantalizing ice-cream links.

And, getting to the cholesterol-choked heart of the matter, turning in a search of +"ben cohen" +"ice cream" +SEC brought up only four matches. Three were from Edgar -- #1 was a 10K, #3 was a proxy and #4 was a 10Q. All were from 1995. (#2 was a non-working page from the Ben & Jerry's site).
http://altavista.digital.com

(From Pam Patton)

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