New AltaVista Relaunch

AltaVista, one of the few surviving old-time search engines, is trying another relaunch. Originally scheduled for Nov. 12, the new site has been up since this weekend with a mixture of nice improvements and some failures. See their quick tour for their PR push.

PDFs Included
The advanced search has a File Type limit and filetype:pdf also works. This is a substantial quality increase for their database. However, like at Google, AltaVista only indexes the beginning part of the PDF files. For example, one 228 page PDF is only indexed up to about page 120. Only FAST (at AlltheWeb and Lycos) is indexing full PDF files.

Fresher Database
They have certainly improved the freshness of their database as a whole. In my freshness comparison of Oct. 20, the bulk of their database was about 3 months old. Now it looks more like it is from mid September with a few pages from the last three days. That is a big improvement. However, their claim of refreshing "50% of the results daily" is a bit misleading. They plan on revisiting half of the results that users retrieve and refreshing those. That should mean that about half of the results that most users see will be fresh, but it is not half the whole database. The fresh results will be marked with "Refreshed in the past 24 hours" or "Refreshed in the past 48 hours" which is a more accurate label than Google's date (since it only represents that date the page was last checked and not necessarily the date when the content last changed).

Size
After crawling about 4 billion URLs, their production database is about 900 million. (Roughly 20 million of these are supposed to be refreshed daily). It is nice to see a larger database, but they still miss many pages available from Google and AlltheWeb. AltaVista also now has 400 million Web objects (images, audio files, and video files). The image database is supposed to be increasing from about 100 million to 250+ million images.

Internationalization
Like at Google, AltaVista says that over 50% of its traffic is from non-North American users. So they are focusing on expanding and improving how the site serves all their users. So US users see a US version while German users have a version specialized for them. If you get a version you do not want, click on the AltaVista [country] link in the upper right hand corner to change the default. For the US version, it defaults to searching English and Spanish language pages only. Be sure to change that if you want a broader searcher, and AltaVista will remember the change. The US regional limit defaults to Worldwide, but there is a US limit available. Other countries default to their own country limit, which is based on both top level domains and link analysis to determine the geographic orientation of particular pages. The region limit on the advanced search page is now gone.

Their Prisma technology for suggesting related and narrower searches has been widened from English to include French, German, Italian, and Spanish as well. Their News search has also been expanded from English to include German language sources for their German version.

Power Search Back as More Precision
With all the turnover at AltaVista, it seems no one there remembers their old Power Search. Now they have brought back some semblance of it under the label of "More Precision." All it offers All, Any, Phrase, and None choices for those who don't do Boolean searches. There is also the default region and language limits, but the Advanced Search still offers more options.

Ads
Following up on their August removal of the annoying pop-up and pop-under ads, now their home page has no banner ads either.

Shortcut Answers
A new expansion on their Shortcuts is call Shortcut Answers. The Shortcuts, an effort to get at material on the invisible Web, are marked with a small boxed arrow and just above the regular results. The new expansion tries to provide answers rather than just links. So a search on exchange rate zloty or area code dallas gives answers directly on the results list. For more details, see their Shortcuts Help page.

Problems
Some early problems with the new launch are getting fixed fairly quickly. For example, the directory search would give directory category matches, but the links were broken. That is now fixed. However, it would be even better if AltaVista gave the full category label at the top of the category results when clicking on the category links from a search result. Also, some other parts of the site did not seem to work right but are back to normal now.

Internet Explorer Optimization
Some features only work or work best in Internet Explorer. The vertical blue bar down the left side of the page can be clicked to open the search result in a new window. It is a nice touch, but only in IE does the highlight in the blue bar show up when you mouse over the record. Click on the title of a record shows an "opening page..." note in green, and after returning to the results page a "last page visited" in green will show up next the record just viewed. Nice features, but both work only in IE. And then there is the search button, renamed "Find" for some unknown reason. The button color only shows up in IE. In Mozilla, the 'Find' text is white on grey. At least it is black text in Netscape 4.7 and Opera.

New News Search
The AltaVista news search, with content from Moreover, New York Times, BBC, CNN, Forbes, and others, is expanded and now provides limits for Regions, Sources, and Date, in addition to the Topic limit available earlier. It also has adding the Prisma suggested searches technology and will add news pictures as well. Most significant to me is that some of these news sources have stories indexed from a year or more ago, well beyond the month at Google news.

Results Ranking
AltaVista says that internal tests show a 40% user satisfaction improvement over the past few months. I've seen mixed results, but also note Danny Sullivan's article from last week, Paid Inclusion Listings May Get Boosted At AltaVista. Let's hope that this is only a temporary glitch.