Probably the most powerful Web search engine available, Alta Vista is a
great demonstration of what great hardware and software Digital makes.
However, more than an advertisement, Alta Vista is a very complete and
robust tool which boasts one of the largest indexed databases available.
Casual users can slap down a few words to generate a simple query, but
power users will appreciate the flexibility of the advanced search
interface. In fact, considering the number of users and the size of
the database, it's a wonder that this service is free and (almost)
advertisement free!
Key Links
URL for Front Page:
http://www.altavista.digital.com/
URLs for Search Pages:
URL for Legal Page:
http://www.altavista.digital.com/cgi-bin/query?pg=legal
URLs for Help Pages:
- Simple Search:
http://www.altavista.digital.com/cgi-bin/query?pg=h&what=web&stq=0&nbq=10&fmt=&text=yes
- Advanced Search:
http://www.altavista.digital.com/cgi-bin/query?pg=ah&what=web&what=web&stq=0&nbq=10&fmt=&text=yes
- Other
Search Tips:
http://www.altavista.digital.com/cgi-bin/query?pg=tips
URL for Staff Page:
http://www.altavista.digital.com/cgi-bin/query?pg=about&text=yes#wet
Home Organization: Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC).
Organization
- Alta Vista provides 2 complete search interfaces, each of which can
search across indexed Web pages or recent Usenet news articles.
- The simple interface
accepts a straight list of keywords or quoted phrases, with optional
modifiers + and - to require or prohibit a word.
- The advanced interface supports full Boolean and Proximity searching,
using paretheses to control nesting of arbitrarily complex criteria.
is well as search constraints and suffix wildcards. Users can also
specify a the earliest or latest modification date for matching documents.
- Both interfaces can contrain searches for keywords to the fulltext,
title, URL, or host of a Web page, as well as perform suffix expansion
up to 5 characters using the * wildcard. Keywords are treated
as case-insensitive if all lowercase, otherwise they are fully
case-sensitive.
- Neither search page will automatically truncate a keyword, nor do they
accept Regular Expressions.
- There are no controls to specify the number of matches displayed on the
output page, but each page contains a link to the next set of 10 matches.
Query results can be displayed with in standard form (title, extracted
text, URL, hotlink, size, timestamp), compact form (shortened title,
timestamp, and short extract), or as simply a count of matching documents.
- Documents are sorted on the input keywords, but the advanced form
let's the user enter additional words on which the documents will
be sorted.
Using the search engine requires an HTML-forms capable browser.
Indexed documents are not restricted by content or focus.
Administration
- Document discovery and indexing is carried out automatically by
dedicated workstations.
- The service runs across
4
separate Digital Alpha workstations, each dedicated to a different
administrative task and packed with processors, memory, and disk space.
- The
software was developed at Digital to utilize the hardware efficiently.
The search engine and indexing software are multi-threaded custom
software packages.
- Even the most complex searches I used returned in about 5-15 seconds.
- The service database indexes the full text of over 21 Million Web pages
(updated daily) and 13,000 Usenet newsgroups (updated in real time).
The search engine traverses about 2.5 million documents a day!
- Each page is well-organized and clean. The only graphics are the title
bar images, and the server is text-browser friendly.
- Additional Services
- Each search interface provides an extensive help page, which
details how to construct a query, how to improve a query, and how
the server interprets and uses a query. In addition, there are
answers to frequently asked questions regarding search results,
such as why they may include unwanted data or not include pages
the user expected.
- The Tips page demonstrate some simple or interesting search
options that you may not have considered.
- The title bar is a simple, if not a bit large, navigation tool
that is present across all pages. Results pages start with the
selected search engine form, filled with the parameters for the
displayed query.
- Users are encouraged to
suggest URLs or new documents to search.
- The service also provides a
Surprise page, from which the user can select a category and
be whisked off to a random page related to that subject.
This collection is Copyright © 1995-6 by Matt Slot, but has been designed
for public use. Permission is hereby granted for unlimited print and electronic
redistribution. Your feedback is
appreciated.
Matt Slot *
fprefect@ambrosiasw.com *
2/11/96