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Sandra Nijjar Professor: Veronica Harris Course: CMP 230 Information Literacy Date 7/3/2011. What’s Alta Vista. AltaVista was one of the three largest and most important search engines for many years, but it is no longer as popular as it used to be .
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Sandra Nijjar Professor: Veronica Harris Course: CMP 230 Information Literacy Date 7/3/2011
What’s Alta Vista • AltaVista was one of the three largest and most important search engines for many years, but it is no longer as popular as it used to be. • It had two distinct search modes: Basic Search and Advanced Search. In August 2000, it introduced a third: the Power Search. • In Feb. 2002, the Power Search features were added to the Advanced Search page and then in Nov. 2002 were also moved to the More Precision page. • There are some significant differences between the Basic and Advanced search pages. • In Feb. 2003, AltaVista was bought by Overture. Overture expected to merge the AltaVista and AlltheWeb databases later in 2003, but once Yahoo! bought Overture, AltaVista's database was replaced by a Yahoo!/Inktomi on March 25, 2004.
Databases: • AltaVistahas a variety of databases: • Web database: AltaVista's own indexed Web pages including PDF files • Directory: Open Directory (formerly LookSmart) • News: AltaVista's own crawled pages (formerly from Moreover) • Ads: from Overture • Images: AltaVista's own crawled image files • Audio and Video: AltaVista's own crawled multimedia files.
Strengths: * Powerful search features, some unique to AltaVista * Proximity searching, truncation, link searches * International coverage, interfaces, and foreign language handling * Indexes PDF files.
Weaknesses: • * Database not as large as it used to be • Only indexes first 110K of a Web page and 750K of PDFs • * No cached copies of pages or other file types beyond PDFs.