AltaVista, based in Sunnyvale, California, USA is a leading web search engine developed by experts of DEC working in a lab at Palo Alto , California, USA . AltaVista web site had been far ahead of many search engines since early 1996. It is well recognized as the first Internet search engine to have Image, Audio, and Video search capabilities It is very sophisticated search options with large index (350 million sites and still growing), multimedia and multi lingual search for foreign languages like Chinese, Japanese and Korean. Its Babble Fish translation service can translate words, phrases or entire Web sites to and from English, Spanish, French, German, Portuguese, Italian Russian, French, Dutch and many others . It is particularly very popular among technical community ang authors/publishers.
Of late many others leading search engines like those of Yahoo, MSN, Google have captured global market, Therefore it is quite likely that to stay ahead , AltaVista is trying to add too many new features and services. Perhaps that is the reason why its main page is advertising-heavy and overloaded with features, news, and a host of other services. Alta Vista indeed performs well on keyword searches but not so efficient when the search comes in the form of a query. However if we are looking for any data base on white papers , technical data , engineering or market information it performs well. Its Boolean function works well.
Advanced Web search feature allows user to build comprehensive query to get exact results. Alta vista’s searches aggregate information into highly segmented indexes, helping user to refine his/her search and quickly access the most relevant information. To keep pace with the impact of various alliances of Google, Yahoo, Firefox, MSN, AltaVista has to remain innovative in adapting emerging technologies and advances in Internet technologies so as to keep its users delighted with Alta vista experience
Contact Dr Sarbjit Singh.
drsarbjit@hotmail.com