AltaVista Category Archive

Venerable AltaVista Dies

After last week's news of the demise of AlltheWeb, I suppose I should not be too surprised that the same has now happened at AltaVista. But it is a real loss. The AltaVista Web database has been replaced with a version of the Yahoo! Search database. In addition to the change in the underlying database, there have been many search feature changes:

• Truncation gone
• NEAR operator gone
• Other proximity searching gone
• Case sensitive searching gone
• Field searches gone: anchor, applet, image, text, like
• Region limit gone

So it there any reason to keep using AltaVista? Probably not for the Web database, but the Video and MP3/Audio databases are not yet available at Yahoo! Search and may be worth a visit.

Some Shared Databases at AlltheWeb and AltaVista

AlltheWeb and AltaVista are now owned by Yahoo! when they bought Overture. For now, AltaVista and AlltheWeb continue to be available at their historic locations and have separate databases for their Web search results. However, since at least sometime in November, AltaVista and AlltheWeb seem to have merged their image, news, and video databases. Both continue to have differences in the search interfaces and search features but the content appears to be the same. The audio searches are getting more similar and perhaps share a portion of their database, but the Web results still are quite different.

Yahoo! Completes Overture Acquisition

Now AltaVista, AlltheWeb, Inktomi, and Overture are all owned by Yahoo! The press release quotes CEO Terry Semel, "We are excited to combine the two companies to build the largest position in the rapidly growing Internet advertising market." While the ad market is what pays for the search engines, the real question is which of these search engines will continue and at what sites? For now, AltaVista and AlltheWeb continue to be available at their historic locations, and they may share the same underlying database very soon. Already, AlltheWeb has lost a few search features like the URL Investigator no longer displaying the number for the links, but overall both still work with all of their old search features. Inktomi still is the back-end search engine at MSN Search and remains available at HotBot.

AltaVista Toolbar Launches with Translation

This season seems to be the summer of toolbars. HotBot, Infospace, and Ask Jeeves all launch toolbars. Lycos launches its Sidesearch. Google upgrades its toolbar. So now its AltaVista's turn, and the AltaVista toolbar has some nice features. It does require IE 5+ and Windows 95+. It installs like Google's within the IE browser under the other bars. It has the popular AltaVista translation option right on the toolbar and is highly customizable. It has site search and direct access to AltaVista's Web, news, images, audio, and video databases. It also has dictionary, calculator, time, conversion, weather, and other popular information options. It even includes a pop-up blocker, like Google's Toolbar 2.0.

Yahoo! Grabs Overture (and AlltheWeb and AltaVista)

Yahoo! announces today that they are acquiring Overture, known for its highly profitable ads, ranked by the highest bidder. And Overture earlier this year bought up AltaVista and AlltheWeb. At a price of approximately $1.63 billion in cash and stock, Yahoo! expects to close the deal by the fourth quarter of 2003.

So Yahoo! will own the Inktomi, AltaVista, and AlltheWeb and FAST Web Search properties, three of the major Web search engines. Yet currently Yahoo! still uses Google for the majority of its search results. That should be changing sometime soon, but whether they will combine the three, use only one, and what will happen with the AltaVista and AlltheWeb search sites and advanced capabilities and syntax, no one is saying.

And who's left outside of Google and the Yahoo! group with their own custom build databases? Ask Jeeve's Teoma, LookSmart's struggling WiseNut, and the newcomer (from last summer) Gigablast. Well the consolidation predicted to happen about five years ago is finally occurring. Let's hope that search will still continue to improve, expand, and offer even more options and resources.

AltaVista Announces Larger Multimedia Databases

AltaVista announces larger image, audio, and video databases. Their press release trumpets "AltaVista's Multimedia Index Becomes World's Largest" and claims "540 million comprehensive, high-quality image files and approximately 11 million video and audio files" and "125 million more files than the next highest competitor." However, there is no good way to measure the actual size, and depending on the search term and the way the image search is done, you may still find more results at other engines. On the AltaVista image search, they added a "Size" limit, with small, medium, large, and a variety of standard wallpaper dimensions.

Now FAST Gets AltaVista Enterprise from Overture

On top of all the continuing confusion of acquisitions and ownerships changes in the search engine field, comes this one. Earlier this year Overture bought up AltaVista and the FAST Web Search business including AlltheWeb. That left FAST Search and Transfer with the FAST enterprise search business but not the public Web searching business. Now Overture is selling the AltaVista enterprise search portion of AltaVista to FAST. Confused? Try the FAST press release. But basically, Overture now owns the AltaVista and AlltheWeb and FAST public Web search engines. FAST Search & Transfer has the FAST and AltaVista enterprise search engines (for site search, intranet search, etc.).

Overture Closes on AltaVista Deal

Overture announces that it has wrapped up the deal to purchase AltaVista. It will be interesting to see what comes from the following quote: "Overture plans to develop a common platform for its new Web search product before the end of 2003 and will continue to operate both AltaVista and FAST's search engines separately until that time."

AltaVista Bought by Overture

The advertising search engine Overture announced plans to acquire AltaVista. It's another interesting acquisition, although there are scant details on the long-term future of AltaVista. At least Overture has the money to support AltaVista and may be able to maintain the AltaVista database and improve it. With Yahoo's purchase of Inktomi, one obvious change may be that Overture's follow-up search engine will switch from Inktomi to AltaVista. This could also change sites like Go.com that use the Overture/Inktomi combination. But we'll have to wait to see what changes will actually happen. Overture has said that they plan to maintain AltaVista as a destination site.

AltaVista Truncation, Proximity Improved

AltaVista's wild card or truncation symbol, the * or asterisk, has expanded so that it covers an unlimited number of characters. It used to only represent 0-5 extra characters and a double asterisk (**) had to be used for unlimited. Also, in addition to using the < for a before operation, the > works for after. This all probably happened sometime last year, but I have finally noticed and documented it now. Search Engine Feature Chart, Search Engines by Feature Page, and the AltaVista Review have all been updated.

New Features at AltaVista News Search

GP notes a couple nice new features at AltaVista's news search. There is now a date range option and a limit for articles with images. Remember that AltaVista's news search includes older news articles back a year or more, unlike the news search engines from Google and AlltheWeb which only go back 30 days and 7 days respectively. Unfortunately for Mozilla or Netscape 7 users, the calendars for the new AltaVista date limits do not work, but at least the dates can still be entered manually. AltaVista News review and News Search Engines pages updated.

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.

AltaVista On Being Blocked in China

AltaVista issued a press release about their search engine being blocked in China. It includes several ways for Chinese users to get around the block by going to other AltaVista sites.

AltaVista Paid Inclusion Stats

In AltaVista's press release on the one year anniversary of their paid inclusion program. "Since the introduction of Express Inclusion last year, more than 29,000 customers have used the service to ensure rapid inclusion and frequent updates of more than 82,500 URLs in AltaVista's global database. Beginning August 1, the service will refresh URLs in the Express Inclusion program every weekday. "

AltaVista Default & Prisma

AltaVista now really defaults to a Boolean AND on their basic search. After many previous changes of the default operation, including automatic phrase recognition, AltaVista has joined all the other major search engines and switched to a default AND operation for multiple word queries, at least mostly. The automatic phrase recognition still seems to be in force and certain phrases will automatically be searched as a phrase. Check the fine print at the bottom to see which phrases, if any, were automatically searched.

They have also launched a new interactive search initiative called Prisma which provides a broad range of suggested terms for refining a search query. It includes broader, related, and narrower terms. Only available for English search terms at present, they expect to expand to additional languages soon.

New Chief Scientist at Altavista

Dr. Jan Pedersen, formerly of Infoseek and Verity, is AltaVista's new Chief Scientist. The press release reports that "Pedersen will spearhead the company's middle- and long-term product initiatives, including research and development efforts on user-centric, next generation search technologies. "

AltaVista Expands Multimedia

AltaVista announces the expansion of its multimedia databases by 73%. This includes their images, audio, and video databases. According to an AltaVista representative, this expansion is due in part to a 31% increase in multimedia searching since the beginning of this year. The combined multimedia databases include more than 140 million URLs for multimedia content, and AltaVista adds over 800 new news-related images per day.

AltaVista Advanced Sorts Again

After being gone since [full story] dated Mar 5, 2002 in AltaVista