Search Engine Review: Alta Vista - Bigger and Better Than Ever
Don't miss AV Tools and Gadgets. It lists numerous types of calculators, general reference tools, some specialized search engines, and many useful and interesting sites that can't be categorized.
For example there's a site for FedEx tracking, a calorie calculator, Roget's Thesaurus, a site where you can search for Bills in Congress, a medical dictionary, a currency converter, a contest-finder, etc. etc. Just looking at what's available is fascinating.
Two other notable special features are Health (which contains both patient-oriented and professional information) and Careers (which offers a job-search service as well as career advice).
SEARCH TIPS
For the overwhelming majority of searches, you can get excellent results in Alta Vista by using only the plus and minus signs to include and exclude words, and quotation marks to enclose phrases.
Because Alta Vista is so large, you can often require more search words than you would in a smaller engine and still get results. For the same reason, you can search with phrases more often.
Searching for Words in Titles
Alta Vista has several function words (listed on the help page) that you can use to limit your search. One of the most useful of these is title: which limits your search to a word in the web page title.
Limiting your search to words in titles is best used when you're searching for a common term, for example, nutrition. Entering:
title:nutrition
will retrieve items with the term nutrition in the title.
If you were mainly in interested in nutrition as it relates to protein, you could enter:
title:nutrition +protein
This search statement will prompt Alta Vista's search algorithm to find items with nutrition in the title and protein either in the title or the body of the document.
Advanced Search
If your subject is highly detailed, or if you're looking for items within a certain time range, it's best to use Advanced Search.
You can use either the Boolean operators AND, OR, NOT and NEAR or regular search syntax (plus and minus signs). In addition there's a menu (one of the few offered by Alta Vista) where you can specify date range.
Ranking Keywords
In Alta Vista's Advanced Search mode, it's important to enter one or more keywords in the ranking keywords box. Basically, the search system uses the word you enter in the ranking box to order the relevance of your results.
In other words if you enter:
golf NEAR market
in the search box, and enter the phrase
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